Ask Paul: May 19 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Here's another great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.
Feeling Brave
DKRowe asks:

Have started the switch to Brave and it has gone well so far. Just recently though, searches in Brave for local or map-based queries seem to be producing poorer results. Have you noticed this? Not sure if it is related to the news at the end of April that they have finally stopped the use of Bing.

I don't like or use Brave Search, and it wasn't as good as Google before the removal of Bing either. You can change the search service in settings and, unlike with Edge, this option is not hidden.

Different people have different experiences, I guess---my brother-in-law actually uses DuckDuckGo, which is weird to me because he's not a tech guy per se---but Search is one of a handful of Google services that are just too useful to ignore. (I put Photos and Maps on that list, too.) Even Apple can't get rid of Google: it's the default search engine on iPhone. Anyway, I've spent a lot of time over the years at different times trying to figure out a way to "de-Google" my life as much as possible, but you give up too much.

This will seem semi-unrelated, but my move to using NextDNS on my smartphones is perhaps best seen as such an attempt, because the real issue with Google is that it tracks everything you do online and then sells your private information to advertisers. Brave stops this in the browser, and NextDNS stops this on my phones. Until it doesn't: people ask me from time to time how it's going with NextDNS, and I never have any issues (at least that I notice). But yesterday, we dropped off our car for service and had to rent a car. The rental has Android Auto (and Apple CarPlay) in it, so I was eager to try it again. But it wouldn't connect, and the phone noted that a VPN might be causing the problem. So I disabled NextDNS, I think for the first time ever, and then it did work. I've used Google Maps in my car literally hundreds of times and that's never been an issue. I'm curious why Android Auto would trigger this.

Related to this, rbwatson0 asks:

Taking your advice and moved to the Brave browser. Do you use the "Brave Rewards"? Also, do you use any additional extensions or have any recommendations?

Perhaps I should write up how I use Brave, though it's not that complicated. Here's what I do.

From a UI perspective, I remove the Brave Rewards, Sidebar, Wallet, and VPN buttons from the toolbar because I don't use any of these features. Except for the first one, this is simple: just right-click it and choose "Hide." For Brave Rewards, you have to open it once first, then right-click it and choose "Hide."

From a configuration perspective, I just change the search engine to Google as noted above.

Then I sign in to Gmail so I can access my email. And then I enable Brave sync. From my phone or another PC, I email myself the sync code, and then I use that in Brave to put this PC in the sync chain. F...

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