Join us 2026-04-24T21:00:00Z for This Week in Privacy #50, to catch up on the latest Privacy Guides updates and to discuss trending news in the privacy space.
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When I buy something in Apple’s App Store, I can share it with my family members, without activation limit. Apps usually ask 99 Cent to remove the ads. When I buy a game from Steam it doesn’t restrict me on installation numbers. I can install it to all of my VMs and play the games. Or I can buy M365 Family, share it to all of my family members, each one will get 5 activations, and cost only 90 (or max 120) Euro or so.
60 USD is also AAA game price. You can’t justify 60 USD for “unbloated” internet browser. And even worse, reinstalling the browser on the same device counts again as an activation.
There is always going to be activation limits, I’m sure. I think you’re missing that.
You can always get in touch with Brave support and get your unused browser activations back or extend the number of activations you have. Reading the fine print will also explain this. Though I think they should explain this better and make the pricing structure clearer upfront.
I only need one activation for my Android phone. I haven’t read the fineprint so please tell me where to get the 6$ offer for one device.
You can’t just divide the price by the max amount of activations because most users have significanty less than 10 devices. Every user has to pay the full price of $60.
Why do I need to contact support and then wait days if not weeks for a simple deactivation? Create a proper session management and activation process. You are asking for 60 USD for a browser, and you didn’t even have a session management. There are many easy ways to manage the sessions, like the VPNs doing at the moment. If you are charging that much amount of money, then provide support and don’t use paying customers as a free app tester.
Being a little bit hyperbolic on the wait time there. But the browser is brand new and they’ve already stated they’re currently working on the on device ability that will let you revoke and reassign licenses yourself. So that is coming also. I imagine most people out there will not be using 10 active licenses right off the bat automatically.
The issue is, you shouldn’t release a product half-baked and ask for premium price, then ask users do the testing for you. Proton is doing the same and I hate it. If you want users to provide feedback, then give the product for free but for a limited time. Look at modDNS by IVPN. They gave the service for free for one year and they are collecting feedback to improve their product. Brave on the other hand, releases the product, asks for hefty fee, and still didn’t manage to implement a proper session management and activation system. Being a brand new has nothing to do here. They are not some kind of newly founded startup without any kind of market knowledge.
2013888 - Add a prototype rich content blocking engine - I don’t think there us a forum topic post for this yet, as I originally saw this in the Privacy Guides Matrix space (offtopic room). Essentially, it looks like there is work being done, or at least discussion around, adding Braves adblocking engine to Firefox.
What are your thoughts on Signal's policy for edited messages? - Potentially a “nothing burger”, but I’d be interested to hear your stances on whether or not edit history should be hidden in something like Signal, and if so what the most practical way to achieve that is.
I understand that it’s a lifetime subscription for a flat fee, but personally I would not pay for that, primarily for financial reasons. But even if I could afford it, I would have to be confident that Brave would not renege on its promise or try to upsell me on new feature later.
And even in such a scenario, I’m not sure if I feel comfortable paying for a browser. Same for a search engine. I also think that any service that is designed with privacy in mind first should by default, as in at launch, offer the option to pay anonymously for it.
The issue with this statement and such a sentiment is that people ask for too much for what the product is.
A privacy product should make it such that you can pay privately. A product for your anonymity should have an option to pay for it anonymously.
Too many times this is conflated and the ask is misguided.
The issue with such a sentiment again is that by logic, nothing is guaranteed in life. Anything that happen at anytime for whatever reason. Technically speaking.
That notwithstanding, I mean, a basic browser will always remain a basic browser because there is no more innovation left for a browser at the very least to be and do what it needs to and how. There will always be additional features a browser can have which Brave is but Brave Origin is the trimmed down and because the point of it to be and sell Brave as a bloatfree browser, it will always be that. There’s no more upselling needed. So, your thinking here I feel is incorrect.
I don’t conflate privacy and anonymity. I understand there is a difference between the two, but there is also an overlap. A private method of paying can also be anonymous.
I do not think it is misguided to ask that privacy services offer anonymous forms of payments for the simple fact they many already do, which to people like me, sets a precedent for the standard of service I expect.
It’s extremely common for people to raise their expectations when a popular service they use raises the bar for the quality of service they offer. Before Gmail, email storage was between 2 and 100MB. By offering 1GB Gmail raised the bar, and people started expecting more from their email providers. That’s innovation.
I imagine that privacy companies aspire to be innovative, and offering anonymous payments is not only innovative, but an increasingly demanded feature by the privacy community.
I understand why you and many might feel this way, but I’d argue that in that last 15 years there have been a lot of innovations when it comes to browsing. I consider Firefox’ containers to be one of them. Introducing tabs is also an innovation.
I hope you are right, but like you said the future is not guaranteed. But that doesn’t mean that companies can’t earn our trust by building a track record and keeping their promises. Many companies have been called out for discontinuing existing lifetime plans. Unless the company is shutting down, there is no good excuse for that, which is why people are rightly upset.
I’d thought I’d give some feedback on the way privacyguides is doing media.
I don’t watch these. When I’s see the titles come up in my Freetube feed and click, then it tells me it’s available on some other date and hasn’t been recorded yet. I don’t necessarily remember to come back. If I do remember and it was a topic I was really wanted to see, then the anticipation for that video sort of kills the enthusiasm especially if I feel it wasn’t covered as thoroughly as I wanted, I feel disappointed when that happens. I unsubscribed because I get frustrated to click and have it unavailable. I feel this way about live content in general, regardless of the channel. I’m interested what other people have to say about it because in my case I’d rather live streams, in general, were announced really shortly before they started so if I catch it I catch it, but if I don’t I can still be subscribed and watch the recorded version of it, and I get frustrated to see something I want to watch and am interested in but then it isn’t there. This is my psychology on how it works when I watch videos, nothing more. I wish they were available when I saw them and it frustrates me enough that I’ll unsubscribe when I’m disappointed again and again. It isn’t criticism, it’s honest feedback.
I’d suggest signing up for the newsletter (you can also do so via RSS if you’d prefer) at Livestreams - Privacy Guides . I think this would solve several of your concerns at once:
The newsletter goes out at the same time as we start streaming, so it acts as a reminder to watch.
If you don’t get the newsletter in realtime (for example, if you don’t keep email on your phone or you use an RSS reader), you’ll still see the notification later and have an easy reminder to go watch.
We post it after-the-fact to audio podcasts and PeerTube, so those could also be platforms worth following so you can avoid the “I click and it’s not available yet” issue - they won’t show up on those platforms til AFTER it’s already aired.
I hear you on the “anticipation/announce just before it airs” thing, but our goal is to announce it as early as possible so forum members have as much time as possible to submit questions if they won’t be able to watch - for example, if I know I’m going to busy when it goes live, I can drop my question on Wed and then it’ll still get answered and I can watch the answer later.
That said, if lots of people share your frustrations, I can def talk about it with Jonah. I can’t promise anything will change - there’s a reason we’re livestreaming instead of doing a studio recording released at a later date (like how Surveillance Report is/was). But we can at least explore if there’s any potential solutions we can offer to any common complaints/problems.
(Side note: you can disable “upcoming” in FreeTube. Settings > Distraction Free > Hide Live Streams or Hide Upcoming Premieres. That might help.)
