Epic Privacy Browser Forums

c4334013

Guest

bad privacy

you should not be allowed to call your program "the privacy browser".
most of the things the user cant even set up such as search engine, and everything the user searches is logged (i dont want you to know my location to give me "localized search results".
also, the program is not open source - who knows what sort of bd is installed.

also, the program did not ask me where i want it to be installed. what the hell is this?

and even after removal of your progam the epicupdater.exe thing is still running in the background after pc restart - i had to remove it manually.

is THIS your perception of a privacy program?

sathi

Administrator

Re: bad privacy

Hi,

Thanks for sharing your valuable feedback with us. We are working round the clock to provide best privacy browser.
We are not sharing your actual IP address to anyone. We always mask your  IP address and show ads according to masked IP.

We solved the problem of "killing of epicupdate.exe on uninstall"  in Latest Epic. Please share your Epic version number and OS with us.

~Sathi

gnu

Guest

Re: bad privacy

Hello Sathi,

I don't think you really answered c4334013's message.

We are right to worry about privacy since you didn't choose a free GNU-GPL compatible licence for your fork of Chromium. I know Chromium licence is a mixture of licences.

We should worry about a browser that's based on Chromium that's totally flawed: it spies on you.

We should also worry about a browser that is primarily made for non-free backdoor-riddled OS : Windows and Apple.

If you had made a GNU/Linux brower version, chances are your code would have been seriously looked into and audited.

alok

Administrator

Re: bad privacy

We understand your concerns, though we have answered these particular ones multiple times in multiple places.   

Please don't make accusations without presenting evidence such as that we're spying on anyone?!   

We would not recommend anyone believe that open source = private by definition...though DEFINITELY it is the case that it's MUCH more likely to not have a backdoor and such.  There have been attempts to insert backdoors into Linux for example that were caught *only* by chance!  It's unlikely audits and such would have found them.  So actually there need to be other ways like software to check network activity and others to ensure privacy especially for huge projects like Linux and Chromium where manual audits aren't so practical. 

In fact, we have built our product to some extent to counter possible backdoors that could exist in Chromium and would like to strengthen those protections -- protecting against any outside calls (there are a bunch of Google servers at present we're blocking). 

There are a few reasons we haven't been able to completely open source all our code to date -- we hope to soon & sorry for the delay.  In the meantime, we have released and will release any files to anyone who wants to audit them.  We're doubtful that anyone has really gone through the tens of millions of lines of code that are in chromium -- it's so massive -- but anyone who wants to audit that and or our code is free to do so.  We've had many requests for files and for help with chromium which we've responded to.

We support Windows and Apple for the obvious reason most people are using their computers.  We love Linux but its usage is still relatively smaller though we do hope to support it soon. 

We did solve the epicupdater issue, now on uninstall it should be removed -- sorry about that.   

We hope to offer installation location and search engine options soon. 

We support EpicSearch right now as we've integrated it into Epic in a highly private way -- your IP never hits our search server, it's masked (the last octet is scrambled) then sent over the proxy to the search server which sees the proxy IP.  Your search results are localized thanks to the masked ip address.  This is far more private than just using a private search engine who you have to trust to delete your IP address. 

We hope our philosophy and implementation to date makes sense.  We're a small team, but we're working furiously to make Epic as stable and fast as possible and increase its privacy!

Thanks for your feedback,
Alok, Epic Privacy Browser Team

gnu

Guest

Re: bad privacy

Sorry Alok, one of my sentence wasn't clear enough:
> We should worry about a browser that's based on Chromium that's totally flawed: it spies on you.

I didn't mean: "Epic Privacy Browse spies on us"

I meant: "Epic Privacy Browse is based on Chromium. Chromium spies on people. So, we should worry about any browser based on Chromium."

Perhaps you could have used Midori as a webkit browser base and make it better, add further privacy functions, add useful extensions. Midori is much faster than Chromium and a more trustworthy base to work on.

alok

Administrator

Re: bad privacy

Thanks gnu for the clarification -- no worries of course -- and great recommendation in terms of Midori.  It's a really nice project!!

We understand your concerns about Chromium...we all need to be vigilant about making sure it's not spying on us.  All browsers are so complex these days, that we imagine any browser project which gains sufficient traction will have A LOT of code which makes it difficult to ensure privacy.  At this point, Chromium is we feel the best base for a browser but we should all definitely keep considering other projects like Midori...thanks!