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!
Yes exactly. This is just yet another of Brave's long history of controversial moves.
Typically, these have been followed by the CEO going on a marketing campaign. The new users drown out the controversy.
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ye first time i heard about brave was in a sponsor segment on a youtube video, my first thoughts were "lol another chromium browser? rewards? bar? ok this seems shady as hell" and sure enough it is indeed shady af. the Tor mode had DNS leaks way back (besides who in their right mind would even use tor in a chromium browser), URL injections, brave not giving out BAT, also them spam mailing Brave pamphlets to customers (physical mail too, it was through i think UPS, which idk if that's technically considered a privacy violation, but to me, mailing someone a pamphlet out of the blue when you use their browser without your consent is quite literally a privacy violation, no matter where you got the data from or how you mailed it).
been gladly using firefox ever since version 3, best browser of all time.
Honestly it shocks me that people are surprised by this.
Any free product that also claims to be more privacy friendly is lying. In fact, if you want to farm the data of the group of people who are harder to track because they care about privacy... Launching a Chromium browser with a fancy skin and spending 80% of your money astroturfing online so "users" can "recommend" your "privacy friendly" browser everywhere is quite literally the best strategy.
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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.
Damn. I've been using Brace for a few years and have generally been happy with it. Guess I gotta find something else now.
I know there's Firefox, I use it on occasion, but I have to get it working the way Brave does. Silly, I know, but I like things how I like things.
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How exactly were they known to be shady?
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Just lovely, when you think you found a browser that works decently and cares about privacy...
Brave’s been super shady its entire existence. They’ve been caught linkjacking and accepting “donations” for websites that don’t have accounts (so theft via fraud).
If you are talking about BAT, you should know that creators can sign up to get the BAT owed to them.
How many will though? They are still soliciting donations without the claimed recipients knowledge
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Install Firefox (also works on mobile!), add uBlock Origin (also available on mobile!), done.
And if you are feeling extra frisky, install noscript to pick and choose what sources of js you are willing to run and/or be terrified/furious of all the non-relevant scripts sites run.
I actually did that for a while (on my PC at least). Major pain in the ass unfortunately.
Of course it's good to block that crap, but usability takes too much of a nose dive. I do live in the EU though, so when it comes to data protection things have gotten a lot better in the last years.
I’ve been using it for a few years now and by now picking out the scripts for site navigation and finding the relavant cdn is pretty much automatic now. If I find a site that is just an absolute js clusterfuck, I just run it in porno mode and let the scrips loose and hope for the best until I find what I went there for. I even take the time to reject cookies manually as per my right, haha. Maybe it will show up on some stat somewhere, a flaccid message, but a message none the less.
What did you think of the recent deal the EU made with the giants? As an EU citizen I find it concerning, because it might be a slippery slope.
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I was suspicious as soon as I saw it runs on Chromium. I can safely assure you, Google is not focusing on privacy features there.
yeah, it is such a pain 😥. but hardened firefox 😏
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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.
This is data scraped from websites for the brave search engine, not data from browser users
Thanks for the clarification - this is actually a lot worse when reading through the article. I hadn't realized they even had a search crawler.
I just switch back to good old firefox.
ITT: Cryptobros and apologists finding new and creative ways to justify the behaviour of a company, the head of which was ousted from his last position because of crude political views, i.e. not granting people basic rights.
I got a bad feeling about that app when i tried it. Something about it didn't "feel" right. Went crawling right back to firefox after.
This article is about brave search not the browser.
Brave Search and Brave Browser are both products of the same company, Brave Software, Inc.
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I am not an expert and I am sincerely asking, but everyone who is recommending Firefox, how do you feel about DuckDuckGo?
DDG is miles ahead of Brave. But the company behind it has a deal with MS to feed them user data. They're transparent about it and the motivation isn't nefarious. But still, it's a thing. Now obviously, FF has deal with google, so I guess it's more of a "pick your poison" situation
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