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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.
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.
“I don’t know why, but it just FEELS wrong” is usually the hallmark of a marketing campaign against something. See: Hillary Clinton.
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.
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.
Chrome for work. Vivaldi for personal stuff. Firefox for porn.
The holy trinity.
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.
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.
Linux is free, is thought to be more secure than alternatives when properly configured, and isn’t a scam?
I’m not saying Brave is good, just that it’s not because something is free that it’s bad
Brave is very open about how it pays for itself via ads. Y’all conspiracy theory turds are starting to annoy me.
They literally had to be called out for link jacking and tried to deny it for awhile. They’re anything be open. They are giant pieces of shit.
So? Then Brave gets some extra money for something I was going to click on anyway. I don’t see the issue.
Can you really call it a conspiracy when they have a new privacy, user trust or otherwise shady issue every month?
They really don’t, not that I’ve seen anyway. Just stuff like this article that’s 10% them doing something perfectly reasonable and 90% people going “they just feel shady!”
If you can show me actually shady stuff they’ve done, I’m happy to change my mind.
Usually when I ask this, it’s something like “they do ads!” to which the obvious reply is “yeah they tell you that upfront”.
They quite literally inserted affiliate codes in the URL of products while you browsed.
So? Then Brave gets some extra money for something I was going to click on anyway. I don’t see the issue.
Yeah, what’s wrong with the browser selling itself as a privacy tool intercepting and modifying the links I browse?
Honestly, I rest my case here.
The issue is they weren’t honest about it.
How exactly were they known to be shady?
Yeah I find some of their monetisation stuff makes me a bit uncomfortable, such as their cypto stuff integrated into the browser and enabled by default. There was other articles that when browsing to certain site, the browser would inject their affiliate links (https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology)
In some respects I actually prefer Google’s approach to monetisation over Brave, although I don’t install that either. Having a browser billing itself as privacy focused while manipulating traffic to insert affiliate links leaves a bad taste and distrust of the company.
I use Safari by default and Firefox as a fallback nowadays. Very rarely need to run a chromium browser.
I recommend ungoogled chromium for when you need a chrome browser. There is 0 telemetry and it flies.
Just lovely, when you think you found a browser that works decently and cares about privacy…
Just use Firefox, it’s always been the best out of them for Privacy
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However I can’t seem to turn off the telemetry at all…
Which telemetry, specifically? Anything you can’t find in the standard settings menu can be found in
about:config. There are plenty of articles with huge lists of settings to adjust inabout:configwith explanations on what different values do.
Every time I try to use Firefox I run into the same incredibly annoying issue.
Sometimes tabs will randomly not work. I’ll open a new tab, go to, say, Google, and it will just hang, it never loads. Doesn’t matter what site I try to load. It happens seemingly randomly. Sometimes it won’t happen on the first page load, but the second.
It’s the entire reason I witched to brave, because I couldn’t figure the problem out and every time I posted to reddit about it I would be told that nothing was wrong and it must be my add-ons, despite the fact it also happened when I un-installed all of them.
It persisted to a new install, too. No idea what caused it and it’s so annoying that I don’t want to bother trying…
I’m not on my PC to double check right now but maybe turn hardware acceleration off (or on, not sure what default is) I remember having issues years and years ago and I believe it was hardware acceleration. Worth a shot at least.
Can’t say I’ve experienced the same issue as you though.
Alternatively could always try Librewolf
That’s a shame. I use FF most of my day for work and I’ve never had any issues like that. I was thinking of add-ons too, but since you uninstalled them all AND it carried to a new installation.
I use Brave for my personal stuff, but Brave has had some dodgy stuff in recent times and I don’t trust other browser’s than FF right now.
Yeah the weirdest part for me was that it carried to a new install; I’ve NEVER seen another program where that happened. But it happened THREE different times, it 100% carried over, or at the least was so inherent to something in my setup that it started happening again within 2 days of re-installing.
Try disabling HTTP/3 (
network.http.http3.enable).
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
“Solicitating donations” isn’t really how BAT works. Users who use brave earn BAT. Users who opt in to sharing their BAT will share BAT with a wallet under custody of Brave. Users who visit youtuberx’s channel in brave and spend x amount of time there will earn youtuberx y BAT. When a creator verifies who they are, they get custody of their BAT wallet with the BAT contained within.
You could say that “share with content creators” is soliciting donations, but it comes from the money you get from using the browser, choosing to see notification based ads and then earning BAT over time. It’s more of “turn your ad views into money to automatically give to the content creators you interact with most.”
They get real money for as views that they then act as if they will dispense it for the toy bucks users can “earn”, knowing that most creators will never claim them=> time arbitrage in the best case, flat out false advertising/fraud in the worst case. Just because it’s microcents doesn’t change the facts
Ok, now compare this behavior with all other advertising schemes, where only the marketers profit.
Edit: ok, I’ll elaborate so people don’t automatically assume I am some shill. I use brave as another browser but not my primary browser (firefox), have a wallet account with a few pennies worth of BAT. I have also been involved in the marketing industry for a while when I was younger, as a tech support person and as someone working to build an ad blocker of sorts.
Bottom line is marketing on the internet is awful. The default is programmatic ads, each of which loads its own slew of trackers when they win the bid for your eyeballs. Oh yeah, each programmatic ad view is a bidding war for brands and advertisers to try to show an ad at a specific slot on the page for you, the viewer the trackers already know lots about. Brands pay, marketers take a profit, sites hosting the ads take a small profit, more of your data (e.g., the site you visited and what was on that site) gets added to more trackers, which increases the value of your data, allowing trackers to earn more money from selling your data to more programmatic platforms… and while you site and read CreatorXYZ’s blog for hours, they get nothing. CreatorXYZ was never involved, why would they get money?
Google had a nicer idea… let’s just show small, targeted ads to help pay for gmail. Nicer because at least to begin with you are only dealing with google, not directly with platforms that can sell your data. Google has your data (all email providers do) and scans your data to give you ads. That’s creepy but did you read the part about programmatic? What’s worse here, one company using data to push more and text-only ads to you, not sharing your data with third parties without your knowledge, or a free for all where any advertiser can plug into any tracking platform which already has your data from visiting other websites, that then sells your data and continues to track you on the greater internet? But with the case with Google ads, CreatorXYZ’s wallet doesn’t increase because you happen to be on CreatorXYZ’s site. Brands spend money, google profits off charging for views of ads and clicks, but presumably only that, since other trackers aren’t involved with gmail.
Now let’s look at Brave. Brave ads are optional, and something you opt into. So, by default, no ads served, no harm done.
Let’s say you want to opt into Brave ads, and you do so. You see some notifications (yes, like system or browser notifications) pop up for ads. You can control how often you see these ads. Brave (as a browser) already knows a lot about you at the local level and could use this info to show you ads without even sharing that information with themselves (as would be the case for web based browsers). You get a small amount of BAT for seeing the ads. Fractions of a penny. You see some ads which spark your interest and so you click. You spend some time on the advertisers site, you earn a little more BAT. The advertiser may not even be aware who you are (as brave has a built in ad blocker so this would have to get around that), the browser sends the ad so there aren’t any trackers or even html or javascript used. Ads are just text based. Advertisers pay, brave gets a profit, no other companies get your information, including the advertisers. Now here’s the weird thing, because BAT is pretty useless as a form of currency (you aren’t going to be able to mine it really, and it has very little value), you may just decide to automatically share your BAT with creators. You enable this feature and go back to read more of CreatorXYZ’s blog. You spend a few hours on that blog and a small fraction of your BAT is held in a wallet, earmarked for the creator. The internet is big and not everyone has a direct deposit number on their site, so this escrow system was created to hold value until creators claim their wallet. This is your money (BAT) which you earned for just doing internet stuff and not minding ads. You can keep it, you can exchange it for USD and you can buy a pack of gum with it someday. But, because you and hundreds or maybe even thousands of readers to CreatorXYZ’s blog have enabled this sharing, there is something like $25 in the CreatorXYZ’s BAT wallet. Hopefully with this number of brave users, one of them will message CreatorXYZ, or CreatorXYZ will read about this program. CreatorXYZ signs up, gets $25 for free.
Literally I do not understand the concern with Brave ads. More advertising needs to go this way. I don’t like being a product.
Advertising simply needs to go away, as long as it’s there you are a product. Brave is putting lipstick on a pig
Install Firefox (also works on mobile!), add uBlock Origin (also available on mobile!), done.
*not on iOS **but soon will be due to EU laws (blink-based and gecko-based browsers will be available probably next year to comply with the law (yes worldwide, trying to region lock will result in 1) it won’t work anyway and 2) assdestroying fines from the EU for blatant violation)
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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Ghostery is like Brave, they record and sell your browsing habbits. I stopped using them back in 2013.
Seems like we need to have another talk with the less terminally-online people about what is and isn’t actually good int he world of web browsing safety…
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I believe that is outdated. Ghostery’s ownership changed quite a few years ago, along with their business model. Read here.
Or you could just enable that filter in ublock origin. Will be faster and more robust as well.
The browser is fine. Nobody seems to have read the article. It’s about their search engine. It doesn’t have anything to do with privacy, instead it’s about copyright infringement.
I’m not sure why this was even posted here. Maybe OP didn’t read the article either.
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.
Chromium and Chrome are not the same thing.
Per their wiki article, “Chromium is a free and open-source web browser project, mainly developed and maintained by Google.” Source, i suppose
I know they’re different. I know it’s FOSS. I also know I do not believe Google is being altruistic and I do not have the expertise nor time to audit the code myself. I am not the subject matter expert here, but I know I’ve seen what Google can do and that certainly biases my opinion. I don’t believe any corporation that large is genuinely concerned about anything but capital acquisition.
They arent being altruistic. Having their browser engine implementation being dominant gives them an incredible amount of pull in the space of web standards and their adoption.
Some good has come out of this and the web has been advancing rapidly, but they have abused it plenty of times as well.
I feel like we are all of the same opinions on this but somehow missing each other lol. Very obviously, Google has had a massive influence on technology and the internet as a whole. As you stated, there have been plenty of abuses of that power in the past, most commonly noted with privacy concerns and data collection. Hence, how I arrived at my original position with regards to Brave as a browser.
yeah, it is such a pain 😥. but hardened firefox 😏
Nope it’s always been bullshit, like Blue Buffalo.
Vivaldi is awesome. Both for desktop and android.
Why do people just don’t use something like Firefox or any forks of it. Its the only browser which is truly still Open Source
I use Fennec (for android), maintained by Mozilla and no possible Google-Play shennanigans.
Mull 😏
which is truly still Open Source
How so? Chromium is fully open source and functional. There is the ungoogled chromium fork that removes all features tied to google from it. It’s fully open source by all definitions.
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.
How is that worse?
Because they’re not tracking user behavior, they’re actively stealing copyrighted content from web pages through the use of an automated crawler. It’s actually not so much privacy abuse (bad, but legal in the US to an extent) as it’s a violation of copyright law (really bad for the content creators and pretty much illegal everywhere).
So why is it in the privacy sub?
Ask @const_void - I don’t work here, I just shitpost.
The browser with fuckloads of baked-in crypto was doing shady shit? No way!
No idea why no one made a fork that just follows the original basically but removes all the “BAT” crypto, web3, all that dogshit, bullshit, annoying-ass crypto bro shit.
Someone tried to do it a few years back and either got threatened with a lawsuit or actually got sued by Brave because of it. The browser was called Braver; you can look it up!
Is Brave not open source?
I mean I get why a normie would back down even from a bullshit suit from a company (laws favor capital and they can drag it forever to fuck you… Nintendo loves doing this too with the Switch modding community (most recently))
Assholes either way. Developing using open source code and then crying foul when someone removes you bullshit.
It is so I don’t understand on what basis they wanted to sue the forking developer. At first it was trademark issues (they renamed the project from 'Braver‘ to 'Bold Browser‘) and then the developer stopped working on it at some point, however, I can‘t find any information about why they did so.
I goggled it after reading your comment and found the same info. It’s pretty common for small projects to get started and abandoned quickly, but in this one specific case I do want to read a comment from that group of developers years later if it was fear, boredom, whatever else that made them abandon it
This is their repository btw: https://github.com/BoldBrowser
It seems they moved to making Ungoogled Chromium after that (you can see that Eloston, the major dev of that Chromium fork, contributed to the repo) and then maybe they just changed the repository and continued working elsewhere? That would at least explain the README.
Ah ok. I’ve seen that project before. Might take another look, although I usually just use Firefox or forks of it. Kind of soured on chromium browsers after Google announced for the 800th time, and for real this time (they said), that they would be blocking ad blockers. I just said fuck it, time to blast the past like it’s 2006 again
They do, it’s called Chromium
Chromium isn’t available on some OS (most notably iOS for now because Apple sucks shit)
Also last I checked, which was recently, Chromium doesn’t come with adblock built-in. In fact doesn’t basic vanilla chromium not allow addons at all?
So a Brave fork would be all the good parts of it (the ad blocking chiefly) but minus the bad parts like the crypto BS. Maybe that’s an entirely different project, I don’t know. I just use Firefox+ubo on desktop. Doesn’t matter that much to me if someone does it or not, but I was always confused why privacy-centric people seemed to love the crypto browser.
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.
How is this related to privacy? The whole thing is about copyright infringement…
The Brave browser is billed as an ad-blocking, privacy protecting, champion of the everyday internet user.
We know they’re not, but they openly masquerade as one and so when they do something shady it’s somewhat relevant to put them on blast yet again. Just look at all the people in this thread alone that are like “oh wtf Brave isn’t good for privacy?”
I mean I’m sorry you’re not learning anything new from this content but we should probably be happy others are.
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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Love it except I can’t use it because I don’t save cookies to keep the “dark setting” enabled and dark reader doesn’t automatically invert it, likely due to them breaking some sort of common html/css standards if I had to guess. Wish they would fix it for accessibility. :(
Here ya go, just bookmark this: https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d
You can change tons of settings via url parameters
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/params/
Thanks! Came back to actually add an edit or reply to mention that I found an issue on darkreader issues with a resolution for putting in a custom filter to unlock origin! Worked perfectly.
https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/11325
Question in the issues that did come up is… Why are they doing this? Only reason as some others mentioned sounds like it would be for tracking purposes which contradicts what their model is about. Seems like there’s no winning search engine for privacy, just the least of all evils? Lol. Glad to at least be back to using it for now.
This is important information but it really should be compared to google chrome, safari, edge, and Firefox default settings, which are all bad for privacy, and when combined, make up 99% of browsers.
This article is written like everyone already knows how to install and use librewolf.
As someone who swapped to chrome > chromium > ungoogled-chromium > brave > firefox > librefox and then back to brave…? Idk, it feels like theres no such thing as a “perfect browser” and that all browsers has a some sort of “anti-consumerism” built-in that we are (still) not aware about.
What is anti-consumer about firefox?
Apparently it has some built-in telemetry and forces political propaganda towards users.
The telemetry is a well known issue and can be disabled quite easily. I have no idea what you’re on about with that second claim - maybe this blog post from 2 years ago? It’s just an open recommendation directed at social media platforms. Nothing to do with the browser itself.
I switched from Brave to Vivaldi.
I was having issues with a web app after a Brave update, so I went to check the changelog to see what might have caused it. It was 100% crypto/nft shit in the change log.
That’s not what I need/want from a web browser.
That’s why I use Opera /s
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By that reasoning so is uBlock Origin.
Wait is there something wrong with ublock now?
No, but it does block YouTube better than anything else. Like, if I just ran uMatrix (made by the same developer), I couldn’t get YouTube to work while blocking ads, but with uBlock Origin it works perfectly.
I’m just saying that claiming Brave is affiliated with Google because it blocks their stuff is like claiming uBlock Origin is also affiliated. However, beyond that I wouldn’t say Brave hold a candle to uBlock’s dev.
Ah okay, I misunderstood you. Thanks for the clarification!
Probably all browsers spy in some way.
I’m pretty sure that Lynx does not
do you want lynx spy on you? [Yes/No/Always/neVer]
That’s not what this article is about.
