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.
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.
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.
Can you really call it a conspiracy when they have a new privacy, user trust or otherwise shady issue every month?
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.
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.
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.
Just lovely, when you think you found a browser that works decently and cares about privacy…
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 in about:config with 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
