> Note that ownership of code is not the same of ownership of a service... if Brave is depending on Google services, then you would be right
Unless Brave is prepared (i.e. has the necessary staff) to be able to independently develop their Chromium base without any help from Google whatsoever, then they are dependent upon at least one Google service - specifically, Google's development of Chromium.
> The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage
No. The whole mantra that "privacy is possible when hoarding data" is what is doing damage. Every byte of data you collect is a liability - a privacy and security compromise waiting to happen. Even assuming your intentions were good and pure (which, as you might guess, I take with a hydrostatically-equilibrious and neighborhood-clearing grain of salt), even locally-stored analytics/performance data is a rich target for less-than-benign actors, and it's information that more often than not has no business being collected.
That is:
> You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy
This is definitionally false. The very collection of data compromises one's privacy, by nature of it having been collected. Sometimes that compromise is necessary, but nothing Cliqz did seemed particularly necessary.
Unless Brave is prepared (i.e. has the necessary staff) to be able to independently develop their Chromium base without any help from Google whatsoever, then they are dependent upon at least one Google service - specifically, Google's development of Chromium.
> The whole mantra that data!=privacy is doing a lot of damage
No. The whole mantra that "privacy is possible when hoarding data" is what is doing damage. Every byte of data you collect is a liability - a privacy and security compromise waiting to happen. Even assuming your intentions were good and pure (which, as you might guess, I take with a hydrostatically-equilibrious and neighborhood-clearing grain of salt), even locally-stored analytics/performance data is a rich target for less-than-benign actors, and it's information that more often than not has no business being collected.
That is:
> You can collect data from users and still do not compromise their privacy
This is definitionally false. The very collection of data compromises one's privacy, by nature of it having been collected. Sometimes that compromise is necessary, but nothing Cliqz did seemed particularly necessary.