Why I recommend against Brave.
Why I recommend against Brave.
If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it's even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?
tldr:
- CEO was forcefully ousted from Firefox for anti-LGBTQ views and donations.
- Replaced existing ads on sites with Brave's own "private" ads.
- Collected crypto on behalf of others without their knowledge or consent
- Injected referral links into crypto websites to steal crypto revenue
- Put ads in the new page tab
- Shipped a TOR feature that leaked DNS
- Doesn't disclose the ID of their search engine crawler via useragent
- Removed "strict" fingerprinting protection
- CEO is generally a right-wing dick.
This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don't want to however, here is a summary of the key points:
-
- Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.
-
- Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as "blatantly illegal".
-
- Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.
-
2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
-
- Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.
-
- Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.
-
- Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests
-
- Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google's crawler.
-
2024 - So-called "privacy browser" deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
-
- Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.
-
- Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to "Forget the Fox". When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
-
- The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
-
- Brendan Eich's feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be "independent".
Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.
Don't forget about the fact that a while back they secretly whitelisted Facebook trackers in their adblocker to "make pages run more smoothly" they got a lot of shit for it when people found out looking through the source code. When I heard that they did that it basically cemented in my mind that they were shady and untrustworthy, that's in addition to the Crypto and rewards stuff.
Why I recommend against pushing people away from Brave:
Most people are still trapped in an ecosystem owned by either Microsoft, Google or Apple. We're yet to see a perfect web browser for everyone, but in the meantime we choose one, maybe two or three if we feel a bit more picky for each task, and use them to the best of our capacity. Making anyone feel guilty and ashamed for choices like this, when the best options are few, relative, and often come at a cost, is just useless.
I suggest reading the settings guides available at privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ or checking the browser comparison at eylenburg.github.io/browser_comparison.htm to know the details that anyone who actually wants a better browsing experience cares about. Better to lend a hand than push around.
If whoever reads this still can't get over it and needs to play a blame game with someone about why everyone should boycott Mozilla, Brave, Proton and other privacy focused FOSS companies because of what someone said, did or thought, please at least find a decent fork, toss a coin to it's devs, share their work and help others benefit from it.
privacytools is not longer reputable. privacy guides started from it a few years ago for a reason.
Fascinating... I knew some of this and it is indeed troubling.
It seems that Brave's mission is actually about generating revenue by any method possible (including manipulation of end users) more than anything to do with privacy.
If you're cool with all that then Brave is for you I guess.
privacytools.io uses affiliate links. privacyguides.org does not.
Disabling Brave Rewards on a new installation is not any harder than disabling Firefox's Pocket crap, or Edge's Copilot integration, or Chrome's send-everything-to-Google behaviour.
I wish one day we can get a browser that serves the user instead of browser maker, but for now i'll keep using Brave (it's at least open source).
I've heard enough of this stuff over the years to never be tempted to try the browser out. At this point, I feel like it's claim to privacy is mostly marketing. Personally, I'm going to stick to LibreWolf.
I agree that Brave is problematic and most of the criticisms are also legitimate. But the point about the crawlers is not really a problem. If you respect the wish of websites to be indexed exclusively by Google, you support Google's monopoly and prevent alternative search engines from having similarly good results.
Wow, what scummy bastards. I used the browser for a little bit, and I kinda figured they were up to some shady shit when I noticed a crypto-wallet was included, but I ignored all that shit and it was fine. But if I'd known what the CEO or the company in general had been up to I'd have dropped that shit like a bad habit long before I did for other reasons.
Yeah brave has it own issue, but overall it is still more privacy respecting than chrome or edge. Brave is personally not my choice. I use librewolf. Still, if someone ask me for a browser to use for their privacy journey I will undoubtedly tell them to just use brave. Firefox(and the forks) isn't a choice for most normal people it often break Captcha. Some website even straight up just don't allow Firefox based then tell you to use chrome. I am not by anyway try to defend Brave action, but I can't see much choice that just work for people who don't even know what an OS is.
The crazy conspiracy guy I know uses Brave, so that already put me off.
Oh boy, I shared the spacebar news article a year ago or so and was hit by a shitstorm of indignant comments.
It seems to me that nothing in life is free, including browsers. Yeah, free software exists, and that works fine for many kinds of software, but not browsers. Browsers are a living thing, they have to change constantly to adapt to the changing environment. Maintaining a browser takes effort, to an extent that far exceeds that of other programs, word processing, games, image editing, etc. A browser is a primary attack surface for all manner of malware and exploits. It's web facing and it executes code provided by external sources. That last sentence should give you chills.
So all that is to say, that it is very much non trivial to maintain a browser. So it only stands to reason that maintaining it consistently won't actually happen without some amount of compensation.
So how do you pay for a browser? Well everyone seems to agree, with ads. This method is apparently quite viable as a business. But I probably don't have to tell you that there are a bunch of problematic aspects to it. User data collection (and resale) is probably top on the list of problems. It's a pretty serious breach of privacy, I hope I didn't have to convince anyone of that.
To get to my point though, Brave is the only browser I know of attempting to use a different model to support their project. They're trying to allow people to just pay for the web themselves, rather than let advertisers pay for the web while users give up all their data. It may not be a perfect implementation, but from where I'm standing I don't see anyone else even trying...
Correct me if I'm wrong though, i'd love to see other viable models.
The article is unfair about the fingerprinting issue. Brave utilizes a technique they call farbling and it does a really good job at keeping websites from knowing who you are, in theory anyways.
People really love to attack brave, but it can be configured to be a very fast, private, and clean browsing experience. Faster than Firefox by a long shot, open source, decentralized encrypted syncing… I get there have been controversies, and it is chromium, but at the end of the day you have to use the tool that works best for you.
EDIT I must say I am disappointed in how I was (at the time of posting) the only one to actually start a discussion about the article’s technical claims, and instead of any rational dialogue we went right to blind downvotes and immature statements. I guess I expected more from this little corner of the internet.
I don't use Brave but honestly there aren't many options left. I can't wish for Orion to launch any sooner.
Fuck is this a Shitshow in the Comments. And here is my contribution.
I'm using Brave and Librewolf as Desktop Browser and on my Tablet i'm using only Brave. On my GrapheneOS Phone i'm using Vanadium because its the default and its good enough that i don't install a alternative.
What i want is a Browser with good adblocking and cookie... fingerprintresistance fast loading time but the main points are that these features must be enabled by default because i don't have the time and strength to enable them on any new device.
I simply don't have the capacity i'm worn down My Expirence has shown that some Webseites block my browser and then i simply switch to chromebased and in mist cases it works. And at this point in Time i don't have a better chromium based Browser with this much default Privacy features than Brave.
And i don't have the strengh to care about the CEO of them. I don't care. i'm tired
I have been using Brave for many years hands up
Those reasons are all pretty goofy in my book. I use Brave on a daily basis on all my PCs. Only browser out there that offers both good privacy and actual usability. Plus, the first issue in the article is literally a nonissue for me and I actually personally really like the leadership at the company.
What the frick?
Good article other than I am unsure on the reputation of the PrivacyTools website.
