Advice Request Vivaldi caught incorporating spyware connectivity in the background.

[Paul.R]

Vivaldi caught incorporating spyware connectivity in the background. But it's okay, because it's totally not spyware. We promise.

Auto updates are disabled in settings. I caught Vivaldi now connecting to https://update.vivaldi.com/stats/piwik.php

Pwiki is a third party spyware company, incorporated directly into the browser despite our settings with no opt out. Who knows how long this is been going on--I stupidly allow Vivaldi access through my firewall because it's a goddamn web browser and I shouldn't need to analyze every goddamn connection it makes.

I am so sick of seeing this bullshit from this company. They claim to respect users yet I'm constantly finding them doing the exact opposite. They still haven't done anything about the Google spyware in the Chromium base. Vivaldi continues to phone home to Google servers no matter what you do with the settings. Now they're sneaking their own scummy spyware into it.
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Reddit post:
Vivaldi caught incorporating spyware connectivity in the background. But it's okay, because it's totally not spyware. We promise. • r/vivaldibrowser​

Forum Vivaldi post:
Return of Vivaldi spyware

 

[ForgottenSeer 58943]

The only problem with this forum is that with all the dedication to security also comes with hefty doses of paranoia.

Sometimes a place like this can paradoxically warn you about things that aren't really dangerous.

Playing on the railroad tracks isn't really dangerous. Until it is...

We don't really know what they do with their analytics. We don't know how well it is secured. So we error on the side of caution. That's what smart people do.. So we elect to play in a playground, rather than on railroad tracks.

 

[Chimaira]

Playing on the railroad tracks isn't really dangerous. Until it is...

We don't really know what they do with their analytics. We don't know how well it is secured. So we error on the side of caution. That's what smart people do.. So we elect to play in a playground, rather than on railroad tracks.

That's exactly what someone wearing a tinfoil hat would say to justify their paranoia.

In all seriousness though, sometimes you aren't really playing on railroad tracks even though you think you are.

Your line of thinking is a perfect example of having a hammer and only seeing nails. I'm not sticking up for vivaldi or anything but compared to other actors vivaldi isn't someone I think any of us here need to be freaking out about. Sometimes this security paranoia makes our lives harder than they need to be.

The only way to have anonymity would be something like TailsOS using TOR, but then you just get flagged by an intelligence agency, then you'd really have someone watching your every move.

 

[ForgottenSeer 58943]

That's exactly what someone wearing a tinfoil hat would say to justify their paranoia.

In all seriousness though, sometimes you aren't really playing on railroad tracks even though you think you are.

Your line of thinking is a perfect example of having a hammer and only seeing nails. I'm not sticking up for vivaldi or anything but compared to other actors vivaldi isn't someone I think any of us here need to be freaking out about. Sometimes this security paranoia makes our lives harder than they need to be.

The only way to have anonymity would be something like TailsOS using TOR, but then you just get flagged by an intelligence agency, then you'd really have someone watching your every move.

The whole tired Tin Foil line is old, and pathetic. It has zero meaning in the age of Assange, Snowden, Vault-7, not to mention Meltdown, major data breaches and other things. If anything, recent history has really shown that people that have been conducting their lives with a decent level of privacy/anonymity were correct all along. (anyway, it's not foil, it's Velostat that does the job)

Privacy, security and anonymity are three distinctly different things. If you want privacy, that's easy to accomplish without using toys like TOR/Tails. Simply encrypting your important items, using zero knowledge services, guarding your Opt-In/Out settings and ensuring you use a privacy based email service are largely enough for most people. I don't think anyone is under the illusion that full anonymity can be achieved without a significant time investment, that's not what we're talking about.

I can't speak for everyone here, but I think it comes down to lessening exposure to unnecessary data-mining and aggregate data collection. That's really what smart people do in the modern age, not paranoid people. Paranoid people won't even waste their breath trying to convince a guy like you of anything, they just don't care.