Same drill for both Debian- and Ubuntu-based Linux distros. Sudo dpkg -i vivaldi-stable*.deb sudo apt -f installĪ few seconds of jiggery-pokery and the browser pops up in your Internet Applications, ready to run. deb file ended up after download) and type or paste. Just open the Terminal in your Downloads folder (or wherever else the. It's an easy installation after you've downloaded the. It's a genuine opinion piece.īefore I start, I should mention that I tested Vivaldi 4.3 (built on Chromium 94) in both Bodhi Linux 6.0 and Q4OS 3.14. Much as Vivaldi would love us to believe otherwise, that's the reality.īut this is a browser analysis, specifically assessing whether Vivaldi's marketing claim of privacy-focus is fair. We should bear in mind that Vivaldi's software and services are free (again, as in beer), and that free software and services offered by any centralised, substantially-investing enterprise are going to turn the user into a product to a greater or lesser extent. So are Neeva and Vivaldi sharing a bottle of privacy-shampoo? Let's find out. More worryingly, Vivaldi has validated Neeva's spray of privacy-wash by describing the product as "privacy-friendly". Marketing with the word "private" because it's known to be phenomenally effective, rather than because it's true.īut the Neeva factoid also gives us a neat route into the world of Vivaldi browser, since Vivaldi has recently ushered Neeva into its official search options in the US. This is an encapsulation of what anti-surveillance knowledgeables are describing as "privacy-washing". And the punchine is that it expects users to pay $4.95 a month for the privilege of using what must be the least private "private search engine" in the world. It tacitly admits to selling "anonymised" data. It admits sending search queries to Microsoft. It necessarily knows who you are! It admits to collecting data. Neeva offers zero privacy above the legal minimum. Why? Because you don't have to provide your identity to use it, and then sit locked into an inescapable spy-box while it creates an ID-rubber-stamped behaviour dossier. Strip away Neeva's marketing and DuckDuckGo is infinitely more private. Hey, we don't serve ads, so we must be more private.īut there's no inherent connection at all between ads and privacy. But behind the fanfare, Neeva necessarily locks users into the greatest freedom/privacy-destructor of all. And sometimes, the word is anything but valid.įor example, new kid on the block Neeva describes itself as a "private search engine". So we've reached a point at which cybertech companies know they can seduce us with constant use of the trigger-word "privacy", regardless of its validity. ![]() ![]() Free as in beer, I mean - not, necessarily, free as in freedom. When brands are telling us what we want to hear, we won't question it - especially when the product is free. We want to believe that privacy is something we can download in a little parcel, because then life is easy and we don't have to do any thinking. ![]() But when Google's users jump across into this wonderful new world of incognito, it slowly dawns on them that Google has made the jump too - in an incognito mask of its own.ĭo any of the jostling brands really care whether their privacy parcels contain any privacy? Perhaps a better question would be: do we care? If we don't care, why should they? And we don't care. The public broadly accepts cybertech's privacy claims at face value, and this has created a digital Gold Rush, in which all manner of companies wave brightly-decorated incognito masks at Google's userbase, in the hope of enticing a lucrative mass exodus. As each jostling brand throws its surface-scrubbed privacy parcels out to the roadside gathering with gleeful abandon, open hands grab at the shower of generous gifts. The privacy bandwagon is in town, and the cart is pretty crowded as it rounds the corner onto High Street. In Bodhi Linux, Vivaldi 4.3 forced direct connections to certificate authority domains before allowing visits to encrypted pages.
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