You’re just shifting trust though - may be good in some cases, but not universal. Aldo does nothing about the cell tower connections tracking the location.

In a lot of places, cell carriers enforce KYC too though.

At least when it came to a laptop, I bought mine without a preinstalled OS - that is far more common than preinstalled Linux.

Or, better, not use a car at all because automated license plate readers. Cars seem antithetical to anonymity in general. Better take a tram/bus/subway and buy tickets with cash. Or at least call a taxi if it’s really far from any transport stops.

Welll yeah - point was that they installed a service without consent. And not just a browser feature, but something crossing a whole another boundary. AFAIK also, while the tunnel itself was not enabled, the service itself was turned on automatically.

Also doesn’t do cosmetic filtering - like, it would remove the ad, but not the HTML box that used to contain it.

Also the recent case when they installed VPN. In general, they give off the impression that they don’t respect users’ consent a lot. Mozilla has been similarly sneaky, like with the opt-out ad tracking recently - thus I would only consider Librewolf or hardening - but Brave seems to be more extreme in their advertising business.