Balancing Security & Privacy in Chromium Forks: Proxy Trust Models in Brave & Helium

Hey everyone, I'm trying to find the optimal Chromium-based setup. Instead of strictly prioritizing one over the other, I'm looking for the right balance between security (active anti-phishing/malware blocking) and privacy (minimizing Google's telemetry).

While I rely on standard ad-blocking, I still want robust browser-level protection without unnecessarily sacrificing privacy. I'm currently looking at two different approaches and their inherent proxy trust models:

Brave: It retains Google's Safe Browsing but proxies the 32-bit hash prefix requests to hide the client IP. While the client-side routing is verifiable, the backend proxy remains a black box. We are essentially shifting our trust from Google to Brave's servers and policy.

Helium: Based on Ungoogled-Chromium, it’s heavily debloated with native uBlock Origin. However, it completely drops Safe Browsing (losing zero-hour URL-level protection). Furthermore, to avoid Google's tracking, Helium routes Chrome Web Store extension requests through its own proxy infrastructure. This introduces a different third-party trust variable, not to mention the potential security patch lag inherent in smaller forks.

Given these proxy architectures and trade-offs, how do you balance these two factors? Which browser or setup do you recommend?