Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

josefStallman wrote

You're right. Google chrome is a privacy nightmare. But Opera addresses basically none of the concerns you should have about Chrome.

Opera's Privacy Policy says that it collects information:

  • When you provide it explicitly to us; for example, when you submit a form on our websites

  • When you install and run our products, use our services, or visit our websites

  • When third parties share information with us

The information it collects can include:

personal data, for example your name, email, IP-address, location; and non-personal technical data, for example who manufactured your device, your screen's resolution, your mobile operator's region and code.

Opera explicitly states that it will provide user data to government agencies if requested.

We may share your data to government bodies and law enforcement agencies to comply with the law, for example in judicial proceedings, by court order or other legal process.

The fact that a Opera uses it's own VPN makes sure that sites you visit can't see your real IP but actually allows Opera to have even more access to your data. Normally, a web browser only sees the sites you visit, not their actual content. Because Opera has it's own VPN, all traffic actually passes directly through their servers. Any unencrypted traffic can be read by anyone with access to the server.

The ultimate truth is that you can't trust any program that you can't see the source code of, because it can be doing anything and you'd never know. This is why we recommend Firefox and it's derivatives, which are free and open source software. You can actually disable tracking and data collection and be confident that it's actually doing what you want.

5