I have Brave on Android. I have never used Play Store. I downloaded it direct or via github a year or so ago. I haven’t updated since and just noticed how out of date my Brave app is.
I am told installing from PlayStore is the ‘correct’ way. I don’t want to do that, but I am told it’s the onlyl way which provides timely updates. Is that true?
I was also told (worringly) that Brave uses Google SDKs (I don’t pretend to know what they are), and therefore my use of Brave provides GOOGLE with information about me or my device. Is that true? I’d like to know if so.
thanks
@NoMoreFirefox Brave has no official method for installing the browser on Android outside of the Play Store. In fact, nothing really has official ways of installing to Android except through Google Play. You can get the APK and install perhaps, but that won’t have an auto update or anything. There are also some limitations on what those things can do, as Android will prevent access. In order to do that, you can find the files at https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/blob/master/CHANGELOG_ANDROID.md
Well, I use that as a baseline to see what changes have occurred and for you to be able to click on links. For example, most recent version of Android would take you to https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v1.56.20 but then you would need to know which APK to grab.
No, Brave doesn’t provide information on anyone on any of its browsers you install. If you install through Google Play then it will know you installed it and which device, but that’s about all they (Google) will know. And this is only because you’re going through the store to download it, using your Google account.
I know Brave as a browser doesn’t provide info to Google, but I am reliably informed that the way it’s coded with SDKs, does mean data gets to google by my usage of it. I’d like a technical person who understands SDKs to explain this, or say otherwise.
Again, not true. SDK = Software Developer Kit. Saying that the way you code with SDK allows Google to know everything is like saying everything you type in PowerPoint, Word, Notepad, etc allows Microsoft to know everything you do. Thus if you write all the CSS/HTML for a website in Notepad, they’ll have access to all of the usernames, passwords, and more of people who visit your site. That’s just ridiculous.
I’m not going to say I’m highly technical. But what I can say is I’ve used Google Studio and other SDK tools in the past to create an app. Granted, they were very simplistic things such as “Hello World” and just a bit beyond. The reason why I stopped there is because I realized I was going to have to learn a lot more code, such as Python, Java, C/C++, etc. While I had learned basic HTML/CSS in the past, I didn’t keep using it and therefore lost a lot of that knowledge.
What I’d like you to try to explain is how you think Google would get any of your information just because of SDK? And why you think your source is “reliable.”
I did not assume that. I said IF you install through Google Play, it would know what you had because you’d use a Google account. You can’t use Google Play unless you have a Google account. Therefore what I said would be accurate.
The vast majority of people using Android create a Google account. This is partly because it used to require you to create an account in order to use your Android. You can Skip this option in Android these days, but it would highly restrict what you can do.
This is something you should look up.
Again, I’ll stress this is not true. This is especially not true if you think it means your personal data is being tracked and given. If you want to nitpick on things, there’s different areas where you might say some information could be shared. For example, if you have Safe Browsing enabled then Brave would send partial links through Google’s SafetyNet Safe Browsing API to determine if websites are safe, but they also do this through a proxy to protect against Google profiling or tracking you. In other words, they might know what websites are being accessed but not who is accessing it. The key thing to stress there is only if you have Safe Browsing enabled and nothing of you or your device is shared.
“Saying that the way you code with SDK allows Google to know everything is like saying” - One word there changes everything, and is not what I said. I was careful to say “SOME information”, that’s far from “everything”.
I was told that SDK usage means SOME data is shared, which you actually appear to have confirmed for example in the safe browsing example. My question was therefore valid at the outset. I’d like to know WHAT information the use of Google SDKs causes to be shared with Google when I use Brave, however small. I use Brave, I trust Brave and believe it to be the most privacy respecting browser there is. The only thing more private is not using the web.
That said, the person (a programmer I think) sounded quite adamant and so I assumed he was probably correct that SOME information can be shared with Google through using Brave.
FWIW - I don’t use Play Store, never have. I have used Aurora store when I had no other way to obtain an app.
Sounds like there’s no meaningful data shared via SDK stuff, which is good to know. Thanks
What I’ll do is tag @Mattches (Browser Support) to see if he can help guide more. I’d also like to remind you that Brave’s privacy policy can be found at https://brave.com/privacy/browser/ which provides some basic information.