Wasn't Brave always known to be shady in one way or the other? Which is why I never get why people say "remove Chrome get Brave" in 2023.
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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A crypto company turns out to be shady? Who would have thought!
I don't think they've been that shady, the worst thing they did was say "we're blocking ads" then said "You can show ads but only through us, and you need a braves token wallet" but else that, I don't think theres much, and when compared to the history of Microsoft and google, which are the major alternatives, that's such a small issue, especially when they also offer so many nice extras.
I mostly use LibreWolf now, at least for my main browser, but I do miss the instant access to internet archive and tor, but I think its worth missing out on, to avoid some of the creep I'm feeling from Brave.
Does anyone have a link to a list of controversy's that Brave has been involved in? I think it'd be good to know, rather than just going of both feeling, and 2 misdeeds.
Edit: My comment below was originally based on a faulty understanding of how EDDM mailers worked and a faulty assumption I based on that ignorance. What they did in reality is little more than sending out spam mail, it was not a privacy violation. I've removed the mention of the EDDM mailers since they aren't relevant given this.
I'd take a peek at the wikipedia entry about their business model, which mentions some stuff that isn't the most savory:
... Brave earns revenue from ads by taking a 15% cut of publisher ads and a 30% cut of user ads. User ads are notification-style pop-ups, while publisher ads are viewed on or in association with publisher content.
On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance
With regards to the CEO, he made a donation to an anti-LGBT cause when he was CEO of Mozilla in 2008. He lost his job at Mozilla due to his anti-LGBT stance. He also spreads COVID misinformation.
As others have pointed out, it's also Chromium based, and so it is just helping Google destroy the web more than they already have.
Their business model sounds 1000000% better than sucking up all your data and selling it to the highest bidder. Which is the alternative. Or people doing it for free/donations, which doesn't scale.
But they serve ads. Do they say these ads are fully anonymized? The primary reason other vendors suck up all your data is precisely to serve ads. Why is Brave's serving ads different?
I personally don't find inserting affiliate referral codes acceptable either, but yes at the end of the day this is the user's preference whether or not this is all acceptable to them.
The more surprising part of this article is that enough people use Brave to create enough of a dataset to train AI.
I have a feeling that in a future AI society, one trained on Brave data would be considered special needs.
Probably all browsers spy in some way.