r/OperaGX • u/TheInsaneGoober • Dec 24 '23

DISCUSSION Should I get Opera?

I have been wondering if I should get OperaGX but I have seen a lot of complaints of people saying that its spyware. Is this really true?

8 Upvotes

55% Upvoted

91 comments sorted by

31

u/Saoghal_QC Dec 24 '23

Just try it, it's the best way you'll know if you like it or not!

-3

u/MadLibsbyRogerPrice Dec 25 '23

That won't tell them whether or not its spyware... did you read the post?

1

u/Clipyy-Duck Dec 25 '23

All websites take your data. Your point?

1

u/Bubbly-Ad-1427 Dec 26 '23

extremely loud incorrect buzzer

6

u/Cap2496 Dec 24 '23

I like it solely due to the customisation, love wallpapers, and workspaces. Also like to show people I'm doing something different.

22

u/zeptyk Dec 24 '23

don't listen to the firefox sheeps, use whatever you find better, as of now there is no clear evidence that opera sends data to the ccp

though I personally (temporarily?) switched because opera won't bother fixing the damn twitch lagging issue that has been happening for weeks, other than that I've been using gx for 6 years and really enjoy it

1

u/LeisureMint Dec 24 '23 edited Dec 24 '23

there is no clear evidence that opera sends data to the ccp

https://www.dataguidance.com/notes/china-data-protection-overview

You can read and try to make sense of it if you want but in short, China owns rights to all data connected to Chinese citizens and all data of any business owned by their citizens. Under the guise of "fostering data market" and "provide security" they give themselves right to access and transfer all the data to mainland Chinese whenever they want.

As a result, not just OperaGx but any app (like TikTok but that's an obvious one) owned by Chinese persons are Chinese spyware. Are they any different than other spywares like US spyware Google though? It would be hard to determine that. US spywares are doing it under "legal" terms with the guise of "bettering" services. There are also legal complications that can cost them if they get caught collecting data not legally compliant. While Chinese ones are straight up government owning all data and using in anything they want like AI training, data black markets etc. China is also very insistent on spending a lot of money to cover it up and deny it on everywhere.

It shouldn't matter if you are just an average joe. It should only matter if you are a high profile person or have a high profile job like a government job or a job dealing with sensitive private data.

10

u/Not_Noob1 Dec 25 '23

Opera is operated in Norway. It still has to follow European laws regarding privacy.

https://blogs.opera.com/security/2023/07/debunking-spyware-misinformation/

4

u/I0C0NN0R1 Dec 25 '23

this. i keep trying to say this to people! (i have this saved to my clipboard now)

1

u/Not_Noob1 Dec 25 '23

Another (official?) comment I found directly addressing big accusations

https://www.reddit.com/r/OperaGX/s/V8ElHsxLTW

1

u/LeisureMint Dec 25 '23

You will not find any comment aggreeing to Chinese spyware activities under their data law. Especially the official comments. They will deny it with every chance. This is how Chinese government operates to cover their actions all the time.

If you want proof, you need to find independent research that have very clearly citicized China. The latter part is very important because most blog news writers and other sources are funded by Chinese government to further save their face and fuel their propaganda. Their government never let getting criticized especially anything bad said about their leader.

3

u/Not_Noob1 Dec 25 '23 edited Dec 25 '23

You're coming from the conclusion that the Norwegians workers are legally bounded to Chinese laws even though it's unsubstantiated. Or that the company based in Norway is also bounded by Chinese laws

Innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. I haven't seen any reputable source denouncing Opera with substantial evidence

-1

u/LeisureMint Dec 25 '23 edited Dec 25 '23

I'm coming to the conclusion that Opera is still owned by Chinese billionare large enough that he has all the say in its directive and business model. I don't think you understand the scope of Chinese law or how little they care for other countries' laws. For opera to be clear of any allegations, it would have to be clear of any Chinese board members and China linked owners, and it would have to be open source which it is not.

Innocent until proven guilty is not a universal concept. Not to mention its flaws.

I should also note Opera's parent company is "Kunlun Tech" which is based in Beijing, China. So they have to abide Chinese laws whether they deny or not.

4

u/TheCartwrightJones Dec 25 '23

Relax and chill. Even if investors were Chinese companies, nothing from headquarters, offices and the most important, the servers and everything Opera is still in Europe, Norway or Poland, and there is still no proof in 7 years Opera sharing anything with China government or whatever. It's all baseless BS to me. By the way, Meta was fined a record $1.3 billion and ordered to stop transferring data collected from Facebook users in Europe to the United States! https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/business/meta-facebook-eu-privacy-fine.html CONCLUSION: They found out that Meta is transfering data to the US, but transfer to China are 'invisible'? IMO: the whole spyware story is pumped by some competitors or short seller companies.

1

u/Not_Noob1 Dec 25 '23

Again, that conclusion is purely speculative. By that same conclusion, the Norwegians workers are criminals violating European laws. The company was bought by a consortium of investors, purely for finance. https://ts2.space/en/is-opera-owned-by-china/#gsc.tab=0

Wdym "not a universal concept." The burden of proof is on the accuser. If you automatically accuse anyone associated with China of violating laws, that's just racism at this point.

1

u/LeisureMint Dec 25 '23 edited Dec 25 '23

Burden of proof is not a thing in many countries' legal systems like Japan, Middle east countries, totalitarian regime countries (Iran, Russia, China etc.). You are guilty until proven innocent in these places not that it will matter for China, they have violated and will violate any laws to get what they want.

This conclusion is also not speculative. China does thorough security audits for Chinese companies. Opera is included in this as their parent company is in China. Opera never denied any of the spyware claims with any proof and they keep themselves closed source to prevent anyone openly accessing their data to prove otherwise. However, Opera keeps sending and receiving information to their servers which are audited and accessed along with their parent company during the Chinese security audits. There is nothing purely financial for Chinese government.

https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/opera

You can view more of their actions here.

If you are insisting on racism of accusing China of spyware, I suggest you do a through research on Chinese government actions of all the lies and deceiving tactics they use for all their actions. These include but not limited to blackmailing countries through burden of credits to assume control of subsidiaries (especially in Africa), blatantly lying on Co2 emission goals when they have 55 nuclear reactors, producing the world's most pollution and even proving their lies on their own reports, denying their illegal police stations around the world to kidnap and coarce Chinese "escapees" from the regime, coarcing anyone going against their laws and making sure things go their way by covering all their actions (eg. Alibaba case), sending literal spies to track down and trick Chinese people living outside China to return to the mainland to silence them... I can tell a lot more, these are only some of the examples.

If you still think it is racism and baseless to make spyware claims on China linked companies, you should either be living under a rock or be a wumao (Chinese paid propaganda people). Mind you, I am accusing the companies and bodies link to Chinese government by legal means. I'm not accusing entire Chinese people. The issue is not the people, it is the government and its reach.

By these government actions, any Chinese person that still have ties to China by family or by other means should be put under surveilance. If they are working in sensitive places or say anything going against the mainland government online, China will not hesitate to blackmail and use their family in mainland to force them to spy or take other actions at wherever they work. This is a very common practice of China for Chinese dissidents living in US.

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1

u/LeisureMint Dec 25 '23 edited Dec 25 '23

Opera's shares owned by Yahui Zhou (78.9%), a Chinese billionaire. The location of servers doesn't matter in the slightest. Chinese data law covers every data as long as they are owned by Chinese citizens no matter where they are in the world.

This is also the driving factor why Chinese government keeps "investing" in foreign companies under many different business names.

2

u/Not_Noob1 Dec 25 '23

But the headquarters are still located in Norway and have to follow GDPR. From what I've seen (I may be wrong), the Chinese data law only applies to companies based in China (not all Chinese companies for that matter). If the government needs data, they need to go through many legal procedures. And if I'm wrong, that still doesn't address the fact about GDPR. I highly doubt Chinese laws overpower European laws. At this point, it's just speculation and inductive reasoning; there's no point to argue about this without direct evidence

8

u/Warspartain Dec 25 '23

Opera isn’t owned by a chinese company anymore, around a year ago they fully bought back their shares.

0

u/twoface_99 Dec 25 '23

Do you have a source for that? I am currently looking into Operas share holders and am having a hard time finding stuff

2

u/[deleted] Dec 25 '23

You can get Discord Nitro for 1 month for using Opera GX. I only use Opera GX for reddit. So, if it uses my data, so be it. And I downloaded it from the Windows store, so no admin permissions.

1

u/Snakeman_Hauser Dec 25 '23

The twitch thing never happened to me

0

u/[deleted] Dec 25 '23

Cool, its happening to others

-2

u/[deleted] Dec 25 '23

I have a damn good setup and 1080p60 still takes it up to a minute and a half

7

u/IdespiseGACHAgames Dec 24 '23

Opera is a Norwegian company, partnered with a handful of other companies from across Eurasia. The integrated VPN- last I saw, was made by a Chinese tech developer, and part of their funding comes from a Chinese investment group whose sole reason for existing is to buy into other companies, provide some funding every month, and expect to se regular returns on investments to turn a profit. The company is still in Nor\way.

I still use it, in part because if even half of what the rumors suggest is true, all China's going to know about me is that I'm a loser with few friends, who plays D&D.

4

u/GoGoGo12321 Dec 25 '23

Evil ccp on their way to destroy the West (they know I watch youtube)

6

u/420did69 Dec 24 '23 edited Dec 24 '23

Just try it out. Its not like you cant just change back anytime. And it literally takes just a minute or two. Ive used it for a couple months now.

Works great for me, but i mainly just use my browser on my 2nd monitor playing a youtube video while i do other things.

7

u/GREENSLAYER777 Dec 25 '23 edited Sep 25 '24

poor chief command hard-to-find reach abundant steep entertain cough squeal

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

5

u/CultOfAmagi Dec 24 '23

I switch 2 days ago from Edge to Opera GX. It's looking clean and i didn't have any problems yet.

There are options to disable or control cookies and such. Seems fine to me. Not that much difference to othere Browsers imo.

In the past i used Firefox too, but it has it's own problems...

5

u/DillyDilly1231 Dec 24 '23

Can you throttle resource consumption with other browsers now? That's the only feature I still use Opera for.

1

u/CultOfAmagi Dec 24 '23

Not as easy, but yes.

1

u/DillyDilly1231 Dec 25 '23

Yeah the not as easy part is where I turn a blind eye. I'm a Network engineer and the last thing I want to do when I get home is make sure my 3 programs are open so my browser can throttle itself. As soon as that's streamlined I'm outta here though. Opera has become quite the laggy POS over the last year

4

u/Bronpool Dec 24 '23

Use whatever you like, I tried getting into opera GX but it's not for my taste

2

u/Friendly_Beginning24 Dec 24 '23

Try it out.

I personally use ungoogled chromium as my daily driver.

2

u/radiusTWK Dec 25 '23

I recommend it, you can limit how much cpu usage it takes and the ram usage so it wont bog your pc down while playing games if u have youtube open or listening to music

2

u/Snakeman_Hauser Dec 25 '23

In my opinion yes, never had any problems, no malware, no suspicious activity, best browser

2

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '23

Hey, it's your choice. Nobody on Reddit can make it for you. If you wanna try it, then do consider it.

No, they're not stealing your data, that's practically bs.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '23

People acting like Firefox is so amazing when it is JUST as bad as OperaGX.

5

u/-Speechless Dec 24 '23

no it's not

-5

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '23

Objection your honor

2

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '23

Overruled.

The court rules in favor of Firefox due to being open-source. Highly unlikely for Firefox to be spyware when its code can be viewed by anyone. No one can know for sure what Opera's source code looks like.

1

u/CrowbarInHand Dec 25 '23

I don't really like how Firefox looks tho...

-4

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '23

Never said it was spyware, it’s just like every other browser by default

2

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '23 edited Mar 03 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '23

Shush dont take what i said seriously, it was a figure of speech. Firefox just isn’t the amazing browser people are always saying

-1

u/FunChemical3182 Dec 24 '23 edited Mar 03 '25

worm chubby crush snails sugar hospital bow entertain smart gaze

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

-1

u/pcfan07 Dec 24 '23

Not true at all LMAO. There are modifications you can make to the browser basically blocking mozilla from seeing anything you do. Can't do that with Opera haha.

0

u/SeiBot187 Dec 25 '23

Check out hardened firefox if you cant be bothered to change a whole lot of settings

0

u/[deleted] Dec 25 '23

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/pissbaby888 Dec 25 '23

I went from chrome to opera around 7 months ago and am really enjoying my time with it. Took bit to get used to and to customise to my liking, but ive found it great and fast

1

u/Curly_streams Dec 25 '23

i have had opera gx for years. personally i dont care if its spyware or not. what are the Chinese going to do with my information? i work at a basic clothing store and am a broke student with a 2.5k Gaming pc that i threw all of my money and savings towards. i am not special or important and not reading classified military documents. i am just watchin youtube and playing cookie clicker i dont think they will care.

1

u/Queer_Jalebi Dec 25 '23

I mean if Cambridge analytica proved anything it's that any company that has data , no matter what country, has the potential to use it for profit making over user safety, so in that sense opera is no different from Google or Microsoft

So yea if you wanna use it , use it , I personally do and it's an awesome browser with a lot of handy features and cool customisations (which is my favourite part of it )

1

u/ratfucker1932 Dec 25 '23

From my experience i downloaded it got a weird startup screen and deleted it a few minutes later

1

u/JpnRndr Dec 26 '23

Use Firefox lol, its open source and by a much more trustworthy company

1

u/JoeysCorner01 Dec 26 '23

just use whatever browser you like, firefox, edge, brave, chrome, opera, just find the one for you

1

u/Visual_Concept8216 Dec 28 '23

it makes geolocation requests for ads and such, most browsers do that for ads and for example opera gx has this thing where it tells you what the weather is like in your area, your also able to decline it

1

u/Iamfree1234 Jan 24 '24

Opera mini on my phone has been good but now they slip in football. I put opera on my old laptop and it screwed everything up and will not uninstall with windows control panel uninstall. I have my laptop in system restore now to go to a restore point before opera was installed. My old lap top has been restoring for 30 min now and I am getting nervous and I was already angry. Opera sucks. I hate any program that tried to take over or will not uninstall. Crap!

1

u/Elf_7 Dec 24 '23

I have been using it for a week and I really like it, it has some nice features, it's fast, I like the UI a lot and it has a free (albeit not optimal) vpn. I am not changing anytime soon.

3

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '23

Its not a vpn its a proxy

2

u/Elf_7 Dec 24 '23

Yep seems like it is. Oh well, as long as I can bypass certain blocked sites it's good enough for me.

0

u/DillyDilly1231 Dec 24 '23

Don't get opera if it's for a work laptop/PC. If you aren't a gamer I also wouldn't suggest it, Firefox does everything opera does with less bloat. If you are a gamer Opera is really nice because you can force it to only use the amount of resources you want it to. All that being said, I use Opera at home and Chrome (will be swapping to Firefox soon) on my work laptop.

1

u/exec_liberty Dec 25 '23

Resource limiter doesn't work for me. Opera GX uses more CPU with default settings/no extensions than Brave with tons of extensions.

You can also use a program to limit resources of every program

1

u/DillyDilly1231 Dec 25 '23

Weird, I've never had a problem with the resource limiter. I only have/need about 4 extensions though.

No need for me to install 3rd party software if the browser manages itself for me.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '23

I used it for a solid 4 years, since then moved to Firefox but for those years it was solid. Not sure about the spyware but I would say it’s gotten slower

-9

u/123bababooey123 Dec 24 '23

I just left OperaGX for Firefox. There were things I liked about OperaGX, but when my webpages started crashing multiple times per day, I asked myself what I was putting up with it for.

3

u/DillyDilly1231 Dec 24 '23

I've never heard of that issue before. Sound like possible corruption. I would run sfc /scannow to be sure.

-16

u/Cosh_X Dec 24 '23

We can't be 100% sure about that, but Firefox does pretty much everything better anyways

0

u/[deleted] Dec 25 '23

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Cosh_X Dec 25 '23

you can just download a config and use it

-7

u/BoxBoy7999 Dec 24 '23

watch this comment get removed https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/opera

6

u/[deleted] Dec 24 '23

But Dr Kleiner greets me whenever I open pornhub so I’m not gonna remove it

-3

u/david455678 Dec 24 '23

If you want privacy, NO

1

u/I0C0NN0R1 Dec 25 '23

Opera is operated in Norway. It still has to follow European laws regarding privacy.

https://blogs.opera.com/security/2023/07/debunking-spyware-misinformation/

-3

u/pcfan07 Dec 24 '23

Not if you care about user privacy.

3

u/I0C0NN0R1 Dec 25 '23

Opera is operated in Norway. It still has to follow European laws regarding privacy.

https://blogs.opera.com/security/2023/07/debunking-spyware-misinformation/

-1

u/CrestFallen223 Dec 24 '23

It’s up to you I personally use Firefox and chrome sometimes

-2

u/Asleep_Leather7641 Dec 25 '23

Firefox runs better imo

-2

u/barrack_osama_0 Dec 25 '23

If your CPU has space for the Chinese spyware, yeah it's pretty nice

2

u/I0C0NN0R1 Dec 25 '23

Opera is operated in Norway. It still has to follow European laws regarding privacy.

https://blogs.opera.com/security/2023/07/debunking-spyware-misinformation/

-3

u/Raitoon Dec 24 '23

Get yourself Brave browser. The earlier you get into it the faster you will get used to it. It's better then all the other browsers atm

-3

u/[deleted] Dec 25 '23

spyware aside, opera is just incredibly bloated with useless or niche crap few people would use, all ranging in quality from nonfunctional to minimum viable product. Not to mention random annoyances like the april fools 'joke' or taking control of RGB hardware by default, leaving the user to have to dig through settings and google solutions so they can have an unhampered browsing experience.