I would need to do some testing but a potential flaw I can already think of is that your browser will look fairly unique to finger printers. So for instance you are already running a variant of firefox which only has about 3% of the market share. Now you are running a variant of firefox that has a really unique settings. So instead of being 1 in crowd of hundreds of thousands or millions you will be 1 out of few thousand maybe or possibly just hundreds if adoption is slow enough. Then add browsing habits to that you could potentially narrow the person down to a few dozen or even a dozen people quick. You would likely be better off using a more popular browser with just a VPN. However I don’t care what browser you use you still need to be careful if you want to stay private.
So you can give some Swedish company access to all your web traffic. Great idea if you hate privacy. At least Tor can get some money this way.
If not this browser, which one should we use if we want privacy?
Tor browser? Librewolf? Ungoogled Chromium?
So we’re trusting Tor but not Mullvad who collaborated with the Tor Project [0] to create this browser?
… developed in a collaboration between Mullvad VPN and the Tor Project
Who’s behind Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium that we should trust them over Mullvad?
Even Librewolf recommends you use Tor [1].
Can I use LibreWolf with Tor?
Please don’t.
The Tor network is designed to give you complete anonymity, but it can be compromised if you use it with any browser other than the Tor Browser. If you want anonymity, download the Tor Browser.
They’re all open source projects, how do you define who should/shouldn’t be trusted? Seems rather reactionary to discredit Mullvad without any evidence when the alternatives provided suffer the same issue - who’s behind the project and how do you establish trust?
Lastly, Ungoogled Chromium provides almost no privacy enhancing features by default [2], so how could this be a recommended as a privacy preserving browser?
ungoogled-chromium features tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency. However, almost all of these features must be manually activated or enabled.
Lets discuss real alternatives and real issues, not jump to conclusions and throw everything out because it’s not “perfect”
“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” and all that.
[0] https://mullvad.net/en/browser
[1] https://librewolf.net/docs/faq/#can-i-use-librewolf-with-tor
[2] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium#objectives
Also, isn’t Tor still funded by the US govt? I feel like of you wanted a honeypot, there is no better option than Tor which is already under your wing.
The reality is that there is NO completely anonymous network or proxy that can be 100% trusted. None. Because you have zero ways of independently verifying any of them. You’re better off, especially if you’re political dissident, using a network that might be/probably under surveillance from a country that aligns most with your ideology (Chinese networks if you’re a communist trying to push for communism in the West, for example). It’s a shame for us that it’s actually really hard to get access to a Chinese run VPN in the West. Don’t use a US-developed privacy network if you know the US is not going to like what you send on it is what I’m saying.
I think you are making more of a political and philosophical argument than a technical one. The project for tor browser and associated technologies is a 501c3 nonprofit. It’s technology is open source and can be independently reviewed by third parties. Control of the network and it’s technology is distributed and is not controlled by any single government or entity. It’s not a perfect solution but it’s better in certain contexts than other options. It just depends on your use case but the torproject is not doing anything “wrong” they are not a shill for a particular government.
Swedish government*
All EU countries have surveillance laws pretty similar to the US yet no one seems to think it’s a problem.
I just stumbled upon that, too, and am wondering how this compares to Librewolf (+VPN) …
