the firewalled status has never really caused any issues for me. I still get transit tunnels and fine speeds. I do wonder how much more it would be if I was able to properly configure the port forwarding though. unfortunately my ISP uses cgnat and I connect from a VPN.
yes but you are shifting your trust from your current isp to a different, hopefully more trustworthy, one. there is always trust somewhere in the line. it also gives the benefit of location spoofing for the destination site.
crowd blending is a valuable aspect of commercial vpns but isn't the only aspect that makes a VPN of value.
this is testing privacy. not security. security would moreso fall under sandbox strength and trust placed on web content, which chromium beats Firefox a bit (fission being rolled out by default has decreased this metric, however.)
hardly even coerced. they were following the law, you know those things you have to follow if you want to continue to remain in business and functional. they also gave data post subpoena, nothing before it, so it's not really anything to be afraid of.
iirc it was interpol on behalf of French government as well, not swiss but I could be wrong on that as it doesn't matter much.
the thing about brave is whenever a company markets itself as privacy forward with no obvious business model/monetization strategy, it's safe to assume that, if they're not already, they will begin selling user data/ads heavily in the future. especially with brave searches lack of care towards web publisher's right not to be indexed, and Brendan eich generally being a gremlin of a human, I won't go near it. I'm not even starting with their crypto nonsense.
edit: and to the people saying they don't care what the CEO thinks just realize, by supporting the product, you support the company and in turn, the CEO. to support him means, at the very least, complicity with his views.
ads were a terrible monetization strategy from the start. I've never felt bad about adblocking, if you require payment for upkeep offer me a subscription service.
I find it so interesting how people swear by brave without thinking for a moment that they are a (1) for profit company (2) making "privacy forward" products and (3) no upfront costs for any of said products. if they haven't already started behind the scenes (I find it hard to believe they haven't but I have no evidence of such claims), they will have to make a monetization strategy of some kind.
none of this is considering the gremlin that is Brendan eich running the show
source model is not indicative of security. besides that, though, Linux is much easier to gain privilege escalation and perform a data exfiltration.
in order of least to most secure is;
ChromeOS, MacOS, Windows, Linux. (BSD derivatives arguably below Linux but that is a more complicated topic that I'm not educated enough on).
the firewalled status has never really caused any issues for me. I still get transit tunnels and fine speeds. I do wonder how much more it would be if I was able to properly configure the port forwarding though. unfortunately my ISP uses cgnat and I connect from a VPN.