I had been using Opera GX since 2020 but saw a lot of videos on youtube regarding the privacy concerns of Opera and about its connections to China. So I decided to make a switch to Firefox and installed a theme on it that makes it look exactly like Opera GX. Are ya’ll not bothered by it?
Hello! There is a lot of misinformation on YouTube about Opera. Most of these videos simply repeat false facts that have been circulating online, while ignoring facts that are public and easy for anyone to verify.
We have addressed a lot of this misinformation before, you can find our statements in our blog.
Opera is headquartered and registered in Norway. Norway has adopted the GDPR, which is the strongest data protection framework in the world. Opera’s browsers are developed in our tech hubs in Poland and Sweden, and all browser data is stored in servers in the European Union.
When you use the browser, you can choose to share some data with us which we use for two purposes: personalize content and ads to you, and improve our products. This data includes general categories of sites you visit (e.g. News, Lifestyle, Sports, Movies, etc.), your country (so the browser can show you local content in your language), and usage analytics (e.g. which features of the browser you use the most). If you don’t want to share this data, you can disable it in your browser settings.
Even if you do share such data, it’s never tied to you as an individual, it’s only tied to a random user ID that’s generated when you install the browsers. The browser never collects enough personal data for us to be able to identify a specific user. We don’t know who you are, and we don’t care to know.
We hope this helps, and we’re happy to answer any further questions you have.
Why would I? Oh no Xi Jinping can see what I touch myself to or smth idc
There is A LOT of misinformation on YouTube about Opera. A lot of it is just copy/pasted garbage they regurgitate without actually doing any research themselves. Meanwhile companies like Epic have Tencent as a majority stakeholder. A surprising number of companies have majority stockholders of Chinese investors.
And while yes, it DOES matter who’s tracking you the fact is on the internet today you’re tracked by everything. Do you own a mobile phone? Do you use apps? Of course you do. Do you want to know why every company pushes mobile apps so hard? Because it enables them to track you constantly and get huge amounts of information. Even if you’re not actively using them apps can and will still track you. If you have DuckDuckGo’s mobile browser it has a feature that enables device-wide tracking blocking by creating an on-device virtual loopback VPN. All connections in/out have to go through this virtual VPN and it can block tracking attempts. You would be ABSOLUTELY SHOCKED to see the stats. We’re talking literally thousands of tracking attempts per hour for some apps. Case in point: I just let my phone idle while watching a Twitch stream for some game drops. The blocker shows 5404 tracking attempts by the Twitch app. In a six hour period. 8720 tracking attempts blocked in total across 13 apps in the last 7 days. Some of those apps I haven’t opened for days, yet they still actively (attempt to) track.
That tracking includes dozens and dozens of different datapoints including your phone model, free space, installed apps, usage information, battery life, sites visited, your email address, your gender, your physical location, and much, much more.
Point is, you can never not be tracked on the internet today. Does Opera track you in some way? Probably. Everything tracks you. Companies make a ton of money by doing it.
And Mozilla is not an exception to any of this. I used to be a diehard Firefox user until they started making user-hostile changes. They’ve also been caught silently installing tracking addons with new installs, partenering with a company known for distributing malware, and recently they’ve introduced their own tracking into Firefox, claiming it would better help protect your privacy. Which is completely the opposite. Mozilla likes to claim they’re non-profit and privacy-minded but this is the furthest from the truth. They use word games. The Mozilla PROJECT is non-profit. The Mozilla FOUNDATION is not. Two different legal entities under one roof. They lie to your face about their intentions and hide it behind the names.
No, because they don’t exist. And you know that.
I’m bothered for sure, but about these posts,
saw a lot of videos on youtube regarding the privacy concerns of Opera and about its connections to China.
I imagine if a video tells you to throw your laptop so hard on the floor will give you more fps you’ll do it because a video of YouTube is a trustful source and a must listen to what it advises to do…
Hey man, how do you exactly make Firefox look like opera GX?
I switched to arc browser right when I knew abt this
Its not about the stuff you wattch online. Im talking about them potentially stealing your Card Information from purchases you make online, or tracking the sites you visit to better target ads towards you, or the scariest of all, potentially tracking your Geo location and getting all your personal information such as your personal chats or stuff like that…
There is a website which lets you install custom css mods on firefox : https://firefoxcss-store.github.io/
Here, I found a theme called Firefox GX.
GitHub - Godiesc/firefox-gx: Opera GX Skin for Firefox
You can follow the instructions given on the github page or if you are completely new to this, you can just search up a css theme installation guide on youtube.
How do you even use that? It’s so non-functional for me, it has 0 organisational features.
My primary is still gx because of workspaces and having 1000 tabs open (and really liking my workflow) but I do use Zen browser these days and like it, the customisable tab unloading is pretty good. Plus it’s Firefox based and itself opens source so…
Pretty good choice. I really liked the UI and features of GX so I made a switch to Firefox so I could still mod it to make it look like GX.
potentially stealing your Card Information from purchases you make online
And then never be able to make money again be cause they wouldn’t be used so terrible idea as non sustainable
tracking the sites you visit to better target ads towards you
So you mean any usage of the internet at all
potentially tracking your Geo location
So using the Internet yet again
getting all your personal information
Anyone can already buy that if you’ve used the internet
Amazing, thanks bro!
Well if you dont respect your privacy, I dont see a problem in using GX
Well if you dont respect your privacy, I dont see a problem in using GX
If you use the Internet you don’t, regardless of what browser you use
Upto a certain point you are right. But there are people who use browsers like Tor which imo are pretty privacy focused. And you can absolutely protect your privacy by using the internet wisely. And its not like I am trying to hate on Opera I have used it for a long time myself. But I was just wondering if people are actually aware of the ill practices of Opera.