Epic, The Privacy Browser

by romaniv • 13 years ago

101 127 13 years ago

devx• 13 years ago

I like it, but can you at least add Startpage/Ixquick and DDG as options for search engines? Options are good and people might not use it without having those options.

metastart24• 13 years ago

Thanks!! Working on more search options!!

metastart24• 13 years ago

@devx thanks! Will be adding both those search engines to the search options in an update soon.

spolu5• 13 years ago

Is there a white listing for third-party cookies? Does it break facebook likes currently?

metastart24• 13 years ago

@spolu, we do block fb widgets and such...but a like link should work. You can via our "umbrella button" allow third-party cookies on any website.

umsm• 13 years ago

You should use the reply link directly below the comment you're replying to. This helps keep things organized :)

metastart24• 13 years ago

Good point -- will do from now on!

spolu5• 13 years ago

OK! Make sense

3825• 13 years ago

I don't mean to offend you but how does Hidden Reflex make money from and/or fund Epic, the Privacy Browser?

spolu5• 13 years ago

They could eventually sell the browser?

spolu5• 13 years ago

They also note that they are routing your searches through their proxy; right there they could monetize. But it would be self defeating...

metastart24• 13 years ago

Sorry not our proxy. A third party proxy powered by Spotflux.

metastart24• 13 years ago

Search. We earn revenues whenever you make searches via Epic. Note though your searches are always private and sponsored/unsponsored results are only based on your query and rough geo-location. We will base any results on tracking or allow any searches or browsing to be tracked. It's not really required either -- Google tracks you and saves your data to target non-search ads (search ads via your search term can be naturally targeted)!!

hollerith• 13 years ago

We will base any results on tracking

I think you meant, "will not" rather than "will".

jaryd• 13 years ago

Is this why I'm having such a hard time changing my default search engine...? :)

megantic7• 13 years ago

Ads. When you use the browser search engine. See the faq on their website.

M4v3R2• 13 years ago

This is a nice initiative, but I would like to see the source code of this browser. Without it, I cannot be 100% sure that what Epic devs say is true and it's not an elaborate NSA trick to get our data :). No hard feelings, just in the light of current events as reported by NY Times/Guardian about NSA backdooring popular apps and crypto implementations the paranoid inside me has gotten more active lately.

spolu5• 13 years ago

Additionally it's based on Chromium, so there's not much source code to hide as many of us have a good idea of what the source code would look like.

metastart24• 13 years ago

Coming soon!! Write us if you want to see anything now!!

hoers3• 13 years ago

Which wouldn't change the fact that there might be exploits nested in the code

metastart24• 13 years ago

Source Code coming soon. We've made changes to many chromium files & we're a small team, so haven't had a chance to open source it all in a manageable way. In the meantime, don't hesitate to write us if you want to see any code or know any changes we've made. Or use Wireshark to see requests going in/out! Our philosophy is exactly that -- we don't want you to "trust" us, it should be private by design -- that's how Epic works. So for example, address bar auto-fill is all done locally in your system because we don't believe all your browsing should be passing through anyone's servers.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

You guys are using something like git right? You have a tag for the build you created right? Why not just release a read only github account or tarball of the source released with epic to give people audit peace of mind now. Add a bunch of disclaimers saying 'we are not ready yet, please only use this to audit for now, we'll have a proper open sourcing setup soon'.

komar737• 13 years ago

Hidden Reflex? something hidden in your company name

nrivadeneira10• 13 years ago

I still can't figure out why my browsing data being sold is objectively a bad thing. I don't see how it makes my day-to-day worse in any way. There are plenty of smart people who feel that it's bad, so maybe I'm just missing something, and I'm open to sound logic that convinces me that it's going to make my life worse.

Also, the example they make at the bottom asking the reader to imagine hundreds of people following them around and watching their every move is a bit disingenuous. It's more like a handful of people following millions. At that point in time, you're not much more than a data point.

simias• 13 years ago

I think the problem is that it's creating an infrastructure that can then be used for nefarious purposes.

And then there's no way for you to know when the line is crossed between what you consider tolerable and what you feel infringes on your privacy.

metastart24• 13 years ago

There are hundreds of companies that track you actually and they sell that data to many, many others. In an average hour of browsing, about 40 will try to track you. What you browse & search is very personal and very revealing - it's dangerous that anyone have that data and use it to determine what prices to charge you for goods, for insurance or whether you should even be offered a policy, or more e.g. searching for "pressure cooker" and "backpacks" led to a visit from six FBI agents to a writer. https://medium.com/something-like-falling/2e7d13e54724 ...there are tons more examples I could provide!

metastart24• 13 years ago

Thanks for the update to the pressure cooker/backpack article - nevertheless there was a police visit based on his googling which is a bit scary. There are many dangers you could imagine if what you search could be used against you (assuming it's not private).

mmcnickle• 13 years ago

The police were tipped off about the backpack/pressure cooker searcher by their previous employers, not some anonymous internet company: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/an-update-on-the-pressure-c...

They were detectives, not FBI agents.

guizzy• 13 years ago

While I agree that many are blowing this out of proportion, there are data analysis tools that can transform a few isolated data points into a complete profile quite quickly.

mbrubeck• 13 years ago

Some people object to the way the data is used for behavioral ad targeting, because it's "creepy" -- it causes companies to reveal that they know things about you, without making it clear who gave them that information or how they gathered it. This can be surprising, and possibly unsettling.

Personally I'm not terribly bothered by the targeted ads themselves, but I see them as one symptom of a deeper problem. The data being used and sold is not data that I volunteered; much of it is data that is leaked unintentionally as a side effect of technical design of the web and other information systems. (This includes data like "the person who is visiting site A today also visited site B several times last week.") These leaks make it hard to know or control how much we reveal about ourselves (and to whom) when we use these systems.

Even if you aren't concerned with any specific information you may accidentally disclose today, you should still be interested in ways that our software and networks could be designed to give users better knowledge and control over these disclosures, because (a) other people are legitimately concerned about this, and (b) you may have reason to be concerned in the future.

saraid216• 13 years ago

There are plenty of smart people who feel that it's bad

Please do not forget that intelligence isn't all-pervasive in a person. Privacy tends to be a trigger issue for many intelligent people on a forum like Hacker News.

hannibal54• 13 years ago

Because it it gives companies advantage over you.

For example banks and insurance companies want to know everything possible about you. So do potential employers. Profiling people and putting them into categories and calculating their risk profiles makes their position weaker.

For example: Google "lump in the testicles" and browse medical sites. Then wait one week and try to get mortgage or insurance.

3JPLW• 13 years ago

Is there any evidence that your example could impact somebody today? Sure, it's just a matter of the right (wrong) people connecting the dots... but is anyone currently doing that?

kllrnohj3• 13 years ago

Except companies like Mozilla and Google (even Microsoft) don't give that data to those companies, and have no incentive to do so. Indeed, to a company like Google that would be corporate suicide as it would undermine their main source of revenue. Google's money comes from being a middle man, they want to keep their competitive advantage (your data to target ads) secret more than you do.

So your scenario doesn't exist.

nrivadeneira10• 13 years ago

Does that really occur? If so, then I'd agree that would be a good reason to be against tracking, but I haven't seen hard evidence to show this happens.

jbigelow762• 13 years ago

    >For example: Google "lump in the testicles" and browse medical sites. Then wait one week and try to get mortgage or insurance.

I'm calling bullshit on this one unless you can provide a concrete example.

ihsw• 13 years ago

It's about control and regaining control of your browsing habits, namely giving users the capability of opting out of global surveillance networks.

Many advertisers screamed (and are still screaming) bloody murder over Do Not Track settings being on by default, and this is a message to send to them: your screams are irrelevant and you have no right to track me.

nrivadeneira10• 13 years ago

I have control of my browsing habits. That's my point - I'm not terribly worried about if companies see what I do, so it doesn't change my behavior. Thus, I don't see how this point shows that tracking makes my life worse.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

1) You data has value and it belongs to you. If it is taken with out permission, that is stealing. Bad thing.

2) Taking one cent from your back account every day wont make your day to day life worse. Day to day being worse is not a standard that is useful.

nrivadeneira10• 13 years ago

1) I don't agree with this. If I walk into (or around) a Best Buy and they capture my movement on a security camera, are they stealing from me? Technically, they are recording data of my movement. Also, stealing generally infers that the victim is left without the stolen item. That's why we don't call piracy stealing. So, if anything, trackers are 'pirating' my browsing information and possibly reselling it. Truthfully, I wasn't doing anything with that information before, so my life hasn't changed for better or worse because of this. No proof of bad thing here.

2) It is a useful standard. I avoid being nit-picky about the little things, and so I like to make a distinction between things that are worth worrying about. If ~$273 is taken from my bank account over my entire lifetime (based on average lifetime), I'm really not going to worry about it. If data tracking is on the same side of the distinction as taking 1 cent from my bank account, I'm fine with that.

plg• 13 years ago

Because I didn't consent to it.

megantic7• 13 years ago

That's probably because you don't grasp what can be done with this data, and for how long this data will be around. The bottom line is in the relation between privacy and freedom.

There's a few point to raise here: how do you object or prevent the sale of your data ? how much of the money from the sale of your data went to your pockets ? what control do you have on your sold data over time ?

Then it's not only about you and your life, ever heard of first they came [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came

nrivadeneira10• 13 years ago

I'll ignore your belittling comment and ask you to clarify what exactly you suppose will be done with the data about my browsing habits. I'll return the sentiment, however, and suggest that maybe you don't grasp that there are people who do understand and are not quite as scared as you. I generally don't live my life in fear, regardless of what dangers loom around the corner, known or unknown. This is the second time you've correlated internet browsing tracking to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. It amazes me that you even use the internet with such enormously exaggerated fears.

I'll go further to suggest that you are unaware that knowledge, intellect, understanding, and the capability to grasp these concepts is in no way correlated with susceptibility to fear and worry.

daemonk• 13 years ago

Because it potentially encourages using the data in a technically wrong way. What I mean by "wrong" has nothing to do with morality. I mean "wrong" as in people who think they can predict behavior will over-interpret the data in a technically incorrect way and try to apply that model causing real harm. That might mean giving insurance companies an excuse to over-interpret health data to increase rates or law makers legislating discriminatory laws based on bad data analysis. It gives scam artists extra ammunition to peddle their crap.

roflcopterlawl• 13 years ago

yeah because when i search for ingrown hairs on google, amazon emails me about products that remove ingrown hairs.

vjeux• 13 years ago

You actually lose quite a lot in term of ease of use and performance when trying to be fully anonymous :(

History, Password saving, Auto-suggest, Web Cache, Automatic Browser Updates, Spell check, DNS pre-fetching & cache.

metastart24• 13 years ago

Privacy isn't "free", you're right. Epic supports password saving -- since it's the user's choice, we determined that we could leave it in. Many things can be done in a private way, so for example we have implemented local address bar auto-fill, so you can type "f" and have facebook.com appear but it's not based on your history nor any query to a web server. We will be building in more such services to make using Epic both private and convenient!! Epic does by the way auto-update for Windows though we hope to make it optional in the future for the extremely privacy conscious. For the Mac, it will give you a pop-up when there's an update so it's just about as simple as auto-updating.

qbproger• 13 years ago

Can't spell check be a completely local feature without hitting any outside servers? I didn't understand why that was disabled.

lowmagnet• 13 years ago

I like the functionality of the 'umbrella' button. Is it something developed specifically for epic? I didn't see it out there for regular chrome.

metastart24• 13 years ago

Thanks! Yes, only for Epic as it integrates all our services. A lot of things in Epic are only available in Epic:-)

jwcrux• 13 years ago

Epic automatically routes your searches through its proxy to protect them.

Sounds sketchy.

metastart24• 13 years ago

Sorry through a third-party proxy service powered by Spotflux. You're right that if it was powered by us, it would be sketchy in terms of a privacy improvement!

dsl2• 13 years ago

A third-party proxy that I don't select is still sketchy.

I've never heard of Spotflux before, and don't know that they aren't owned and operated by one of your advertising partners.

untothebreach• 13 years ago

I see under the download button it says, 'more versions coming soon'...happen to know when us linux users will get some love?

metastart24• 13 years ago

Soon we hope...we LOVE linux!!!! We're also a bit paranoid about backdoors and use linux often ourselves...

kamjam2• 13 years ago

From recent news, I doubt Linux (or any OS) is safe from that intrusion...

cji• 13 years ago

Interesting choice of name considering http://epic.org/

metastart24• 13 years ago

We've been the Epic Browser for years now - were stuck with the name contractually!

hngiszmo• 13 years ago

WTF??? Guys, wake up! If it is not open source, it does not protect your privacy. Period. We see how other companies got coerced into breaking privacy for some dollars. The company-driven closed source development is flawed as long as we grant governments this power.

What we need is not yet another startup that tries to make money on our private data (yeah, read Epic's FAQ how they make money). We need a stack of hardware and software you can easily trust. My dream is to use a computer that is produced on an open design by one of hundreds of fabs that would call out a competitor that puts backdoors into the chips to boost their own reputation. My dream is a software stack that is completely signed by tons of trustful developers with the possibility to easily add my signature after bit-reproducibly compiling code I checked. If this comes true, people will identify easier the packages that were developed by companies only and find ways to replace them for a trustworthy stack.

Open source apps distributed via Android market for example are closed source apps compiled by the developer from code he maybe shared and that was possibly modified by google running on video-audio-multi-sensor-bugs with several agencies having a direct wire to them. If you still use windows, your PC is not better than that. Think about it. Thanks to Snowden we can finally talk about these issues without a single person calling us paranoid.

metastart24• 13 years ago

Epic is open source...anyone who wants our source code, just write us!! Sorry we've been struggling to get the product ready and hadn't prepared to release all the code yet but will do it fast. Chromium is a huge code base & we're a small team so we hadn't gotten to it yet.

We don't make any money from anyone's private data or any data (period). We make revenues at this point exclusively from searches you do via our private search engine & always protect your searches' privacy.

Thanks for other ideas...others can comment...

Sir_Cmpwn• 13 years ago

GitHub. Just make a GitHub repo.

sergiotapia• 13 years ago

Just plop whatever you have in it's current state on Github. _Any_ code is better than no code. No one will use this unless it's open sourced.

Sagat• 13 years ago

There is probably a backdoor for government agencies anyway.

metastart24• 13 years ago

If you find one in Chromium PLEASE let us know!!!

tptacek2• 13 years ago

Sounds awesome. I'll definitely use this instead of the browser project whose TLS stack is maintained by one of the best known crypto software developers on the Internet, and run by the company that has almost singlehandledly mainstreamed TLS forward secrecy.

psycr2• 13 years ago

Well, for the unenlightened, which one is that? Firefox? Chrome?

hoers3• 13 years ago

Chrom(ium), the open source foundation of chrome

philip1209• 13 years ago

cURL - the most secure way to browse the internet.

ynniv• 13 years ago

Stallman (still?) uses wget over email: http://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

RandomSpamMan• 13 years ago

Out of interest, has anyone noticed anything outside of the ordinary? My antivirus (Kaspersky) is flagging it as a Trojan. http://i.imgur.com/qTW8zPu.png

dsl2• 13 years ago

Kaspersky identifies modified versions of popular applications. I suspect they don't know Epic is a "legitimate" modification of Chromium yet.

genetik• 13 years ago

Is this a re-launch of the Epic browser originally released in 2010 which targeted Indian users?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_(web_browser)

hpagey• 13 years ago

I think it is. I remember the name of the company was hidden reflex. One of my classmates was working for it.

megantic7• 13 years ago

Looks like an attempt at pivoting, jumping of the privacy bandwagon. Doesn't really make a good case that this browser is based on belief of privacy as stated in their faq.

appamatto• 13 years ago

What is being done here to combat browser fingerprinting? This seems like the most challenging threat to anonymity.

metastart24• 13 years ago

We block tons of fingerprinting scripts. More coming soon (fingerprinting is tough!).

CoreLogic• 13 years ago

Nice try NSA...

jfasi• 13 years ago

I find it a little suspicious that a browser that purports to be private gives a unique fingerprint on panopticlick...

https://panopticlick.eff.org

M4v3R2• 13 years ago

That's probably because its settings are so unique and different from other browsers. And since not many people check that site, you could be the first one.

autodidakto• 13 years ago

It mentions fingerprinting as a threat, but doesn't do anything specific against it. Probably because no one is quite sure how to stop it. From the FAQ:

How does Epic protect against browser fingerprinting?

There is no agreed-upon way to prevent browser fingerprinting or device fingerprinting at this point. There are many fingerprinting techniques which a solution would need to protect against. While we are working on a more thorough solution [...]

I imagine it could send the default plugin/header/user agent of IE/Chrome/Firefox, or random stuff each time...

metastart24• 13 years ago

Epic at present blocks tons of fingerprinting scripts. Comments above seem right to us as well that user-agent doesn't make sense to use from a fingerprinting perspective. Fonts+Plugins do though. We actually do and could've released things to protect against fingerprinting actively right now BUT it wouldn't have been comprehensive or defended against some of the key things we'd imagine a fingerprinter would use e.g. flash fonts call & more. So there's more work to be done - please join our forums and help us come up with more thorough solutions for fingerprinting.

nieve• 13 years ago

I just checked myself and the identifying info for me was by a huge margin fonts & plugins. User Agent will become far less relevant if Epic gets more adoption and keeps a lock-step updating pattern. Perhaps as use of web fonts becomes more common perhaps it will become more feasible to send just a static list that's the same for all Epic users[1]. I suspect there's a potential cache-enumeration issue that would help tag browsers there, but I'm not sure.

As for plugins, that's a bit more difficult - I wouldn't mind an option to ask if I wanted to let a site enumerate plugins, but you start getting into header games & pointless reloads there if you're not careful.

[1] I force my own fonts for everything, so no UX issues for me. No idea how much of an issue it is for other folks.

hellbanTHIS• 13 years ago

This is cool and I'm going to use it but I want people make money too, so personally I'd be fine if you took my geographic location and served me ads based on that.

I want to know what's on sale at the nearest grocery store, and I wouldn't be too creeped out if you knew where I was geographically. But maybe that's just me.

diN0bot• 13 years ago

how to use epic with 1password plugin?

metastart24• 13 years ago

Plugins work with Epic - another user has said 1password works in Epic.

alan_cx2• 13 years ago

Any one know how this compares with SRWare Iron?

richardlblair• 13 years ago

This second this is on github, I will download it. I look forward to it.

user2• 13 years ago

Companies are trying capture as much information about you as possibly by casting a wide net of "trackers".

The truth is companies don't know what to do with all of your data.

megantic7• 13 years ago

I cringe when I read their claim to be "the first-ever privacy-focused browser built on chromium". Iron[1] was first released in 2008 to circumvent privacy issues with chrome.

I wonder if they did a really poor job at researching what already exists and are truly clueless about iron, or if they outright lied for marketing purposes. Hopefully they're not clueless about privacy and are not lying about features, though I would not bet my privacy on "hopefully" specially when epic browser website lacks an https version and epic browser bears a unique fingerprint on panopticlick.

[1] https://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

metastart24• 13 years ago

SRware is focused on removing google stuff...not really privacy in general, at least from our view.

Epic, The Privacy Browser

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