What Is a Branded Browser?

To make a branded browser, a company takes an already existing browser (Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Chromium or Chrome) and makes some insignificant modifications to it. They can change a symbol, rename a few menu options or insert third party extensions, search boxes or advertising spots.

A good example of a branded browser is the Russian government’s”Sputnik-Browser,”built upon Firefox and based on the government-owned”Sputnik” search engine.

The browser provides features like blocking”unnecessary articles,” protecting children with”parent management,” cutting out”the most annoying and awful ads,” and so on. Additionally, you can get local government’s online pages, access local government services’ telephone numbers and local maps.

The Sputnik Browser has a feature for parents called”online scoring.” It works through”dnevnik.ru” (dnevnik means journal in Russian), an internet school evaluations agency and bitcoincasinoreview.info. Parents can observe their children are doing at the school right in their house or workplacefree spins no deposit bitcoin casino bitcoin casino with paysafecard browser won’t work on Linux-based OS and is only for Windows, Android and iOS. In the future, developers promise combined login system and fresh Synchronization Feature.

Porn, Tits and Schoolgirls

“It is very important for us when typing’schoolgirl’ in the search box to find girls in accurate dresses and white aprons, but not something different,” says Rostelecom Vice President Alexey Basov when asked about the government-curated Sputnik search engine.

Users appeared to test just how well the search engine filtered this pornographic content out. Statistics show that keywords searched on Sputnik during May 29, 2015 may was”Tits” and”Porn.” On exactly the same day, Yandex statistics showed”odnoklassniki” and ???vk.com” (popular Russian social networks) words as a key search requests. This means most of users used the Sputnik search engine only to search that it blocks, which brings its purpose of censorship.

By six times its user count fell since Sputnik’s launch May 22, 2015how do bitcoin casino work best bitcoin casino to deposit reddit On May 22, it was at about 141.8 million users, but by May 27, only 23.6 million searches went through the browser.

Yandex Branded Browser

The Yandex e-mail service is scary to use due to context advertising right in the mailbox and a standard”we will disclose your info to the authorities” license agreement.

Yandex is a tiny version of Google, with surveillance enabled by default. The feature is enabled in the browser via a so-called”smart address line,” which sends any input to Yandex servers for”analyzing.”

Yandex is a closed source project, based on some other open source projects and Chromium source code. It’s a list of tools for comfort browsing, and if you believe you don’t require privacy, it could be a tool for work. For example, foreign journalists may use this search engine as a compass for Russian”pop” segments of the Internet.

The service’s privacy policy contains all the required permissions for the enterprise to steal userdata and give it to authorities”during the legal process.”  Watch 1.1.2 and 4 paragraphs for additional information.

There are lot of similar products made by webmasters both for private and government companies, to spy on users and make some profit. When you do not let anyone avoid using them and see their products know what do you do on the net. Government software is the most dangerous since it records everything.

Corporate software makes no difference, since it has no strong encryption and all the private user data could be intercepted directly by anyone (including the hackers) or by request.

Western IT-companies use cookies for tracking user activity and placing context ads as well. They even collaborate by themselves in cases. However, the in USA, private companies trying to hide facts that are such from society. In Russia they simply don’t care.

What do you think of Russian branded browsers? Let us know in the comments below!

Pictures courtesy of AppleApple, Yandex.

Source: bitcoincasinoreview.info