NicosAlwaysTired 🇹🇭

upcoming game that im making.. 👀

Vivaldi calls itself a browser that "doesn't track you" and is "privacy by design." But the technical reality tells us a different story. Vivaldi's own browser privacy policy says each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID and sends it to Vivaldi every 24 hours, together with version/build info, CPU architecture, screen resolution, time since last message, and an approximate location derived from a truncated IP. Vivaldi has said in blog and forum posts that the ID remains to improve the accuracy of active-user counts. Vivaldi is also NOT fully auditable. The company says roughly 92% of the browser is opensource Chromium, 3% is opensource Vivaldi code, and about 5% is a closed-source UI layer released only in obfuscated form. Vivaldi also says some security-relevant code lives in that UI. That means outsiders cannot independently audit the entire browser. The defaults are NOT especially hardened for privacy either. Out of the box, Vivaldi retains several Chromium-style behaviors: Google Safe Browsing is enabled, Google-backed services power some features, WebRTC remains on, and third-party cookies are only blocked by default in Private Windows (not regular browsing). Its built-in ad blocker is NOT maximally strict by default, and Vivaldi's own documentation notes that ads from certain partner search engines may still be allowed unless you disable the relevant list. Then there is Direct Match. Vivaldi describes it as a clearly labeled sponsored-suggestion feature that matches locally - but clicking it can trigger a background attribution request and may involve affiliate-network cookies. That can be disabled, and it is not the same thing as typing being silently sent to a partner. But it is still monetized navigation inside a browser marketed around privacy. Vivaldi says Safe Browsing works through downloaded lists and limited hash-based checks rather than sending Google a raw record of every page you visit. Broad claims like "no state partitioning" or "version lag automatically means unpatched CVEs" overreach. Vivaldi currently tracks Chromium Extended Stable with backported fixes. "privacy-first" should mean verifiable architecture, privacy-preserving defaults, and minimal unavoidable identifiers.