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.
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.
A crypto company turns out to be shady? Who would have thought!
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.
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.
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.
How exactly were they known to be shady?
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.
They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak; also 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
In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,
In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Add ghostery and you never have to see and refuse a cookie consent banner again.
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…
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.
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 😏
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).
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.
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 just switch back to good old firefox.
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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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]
