Lysander666 |
11-30-2018 03:40 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by PROBLEMCHYLD
(Post 5931679)
Does it phone home and all that data collecting crap?!!!
|
There are various responses to this, but the short answer is - no, it does not collect data. It does contact Google, but only to:
a] update certain certificates
b] update Widevine
c] update the safe browsing blacklist [this can be turned off].
This question has been asked a number of times, as you can imagine.
From one of the devs:
Quote:
No, we do not share any data with Google knowingly (except for search and search suggestions). We use the Chromium code base and there are some "call home" for various things there, but we believe we have plugged all those holes. If we missed something, it would be a bug.
|
Slightly longer answer from the Vivaldi team:
Quote:
There is no "spyware" involved here.
The two main reasons for Vivaldi to access Google servers automatically are:
Downloading and updating necessary components, the two major ones are the Certificate component and the Widevine video decoder. The certificate component performs extra checks on certificates, including revocation. The list of components is available on this internal page vivaldi://components
Downloading and updating the Safe Browsing blacklist. This is a so-called Bloom filter. This system works by calculating a very big number (hash) for the URL and parts of it. Then a few digits (32 bits) of these numbers are used to check in the local filter database. If the entry corresponding to the smaller number indicates that the URL may be blacklisted, Vivaldi uses more digits from the candidate number to request more information from the online Safe Browsing database, if still a possible blacklist, more data, using more digits of the number, are requested, until the server sends a list of URLs that are blacklisted. If one of the URLs is a match, then the page is block. At no time does Vivaldi send the URL to the server. The use of calculated hashes means that two almost identical URLs have wildly different hashes, but two wildly different URLs can have the same calculated hash (especially if one is using just a few digits). It is also almost impossible to reverse the calculation to get the original URL. These two points mean that it is not really possible for Google (or anyone) seeing the hash to tell which URL the user visited (in the case of the URL list, one might reasonably assume it was one of those, but it is still not a sure thing).
In neither case does Vivaldi send any cookies to the servers; only the IP address is, as always, known to the servers.
With respect to the connections to mtalk.google.com, this server is Google's Push Notifications server aka (Google Cloud Messaging, GCM). One of its uses is updates for a user's Sync data, which we are have disabled, since our Sync system uses a different system for such notification. Another use of this service is "Push Notifications" aka "Notification" from web sites. Whenever the user accepts Notifications from a website, persistent actions for receiving and handling these notifications are registered in Vivaldi, and among these actions is the establishment of a persistent connection to the GCM server, to listen for the notifications, and these connections are re-established immediately when Vivaldi starts. IOW, the connections to mtalk.google.com were initiated and configured by the user. Relevant URLs for this is chrome://settings/content/notifications , chrome://settings/siteData and vivaldi://gcm-internals
|
Even longer answer:
Read the privacy policy. Here's an excerpt:
Quote:
When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your computer. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message. We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing the last octet of the IP address from your Vivaldi client then we store the resolved approximate location after using a local geoip lookup. The purpose of this collection is to determine the total number of active users and their geographical distribution.
...
Your browsing history such as visited URLs, typed search keywords and downloaded content are stored in your client profile and only accessible by your own action. Vivaldi AS has no access to this data. Your history cannot be shared unless it is by your own action.
When you turn on Search suggestions in your Settings (Settings > Search), Vivaldi will send a request to the chosen search engine with the typed keyword in order to display search results. Privacy policies for individual supported search engines can be found here.
Vivaldi integrates the Safe browsing API from Google, which checks the site you are visiting against a master list of known suspected phishing and malware sites. This feature can be turned off in the Privacy settings (Settings > Privacy > Privacy).
Many websites use cookies to identify repeat visitors and store information about their site visitors. Vivaldi stores cookies based on the user’s privacy settings (Setting > Privacy > Cookies) but how the cookie is used is determined by the website you are visiting and types of cookies. Therefore it is important that you understand the privacy policy of the websites you are visiting. You can view, manage and remove all stored cookies in your privacy settings.
|
This is the only way I'm getting to Iceland any time soon, unfortunately.
|