I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
Brave is literally a grift. Too many people are falling for it.
Too many people only care about the openweb or shitty companies in the comments. They have no fucking willpower, no patience, and no follow through. Their complaints are utterly meaningless because they utterly refuse to stick to their guns.
There’s one and literally only one browser that actually stands for all the things the most vocal people around here claim to care about.
Yet, they use Brave.
Ehh there is only so much a single person can care about. If you have a life and aren’t effectively an activist/lobbyis by profession you can’t care about politics both local and global, preserving nature and ecolody, world hunger & disease, and a million other things like which software company is less evil all at once and follow through 100%, supporting all of the causes meaningfully.
Not to mention we have to make compromises, too.
There’s one and literally only one browser that actually stands for all the things the most vocal people around here claim to care about.
Hard disagree. Firefox had its fair share of controversies, it’s still technically funded by Google (while not accepting donations), and Mozilla Foundation as a nonprofit is pretty questionable too.
The leadership of Mozilla Corporation is shit too like any other corp; they lay off engineers and give themselves huge bonuses.
It takes them years to even acknowledge simple bugs, let alone actually getting to fix them.
A huge part of why Firefox lost the “browser wars” is also that they failed to make it easy to build into other apps so it could work more like Electron, while also pissing off users with surface changes that break their workflow.
Overall it’s better than Chrome especially if you care about privacy, but it’s not a huge win.
I turn on youtube and see no ads
Just use uBlock Origin.
What are the better solutions for iOS users?
Someone mentioned Firefox Focus.
Not on iOS. Every browser on iOS is effectively just a skin for safari. There is no true Firefox for iPhone, or chrome for that matter.
If you’re using an iPhone, you willingly surrendered your freedom of choice. This is what you paid for.
As I stated in a previous post, if you are using an iPhone you’ve basically given up on having privacy. For ad blockers you could use AdGuard and Safari, it’s better than nothing. You could also use something like Mullvad VPN, it has DNS ad blocking.
That’s the most ridiculous statement I’ve seen today. iOS has infinitely better privacy than Android lawl
An iPhone is a give-up on privacy because you don’t get alternatives. If you don’t like your stock OS on an Android phone you can just switch OS (for example GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, ect.). If you don’t like the normal YouTube app you can just sideload a different one. You don’t get this kind of freedom with an iPhone. A prime example of this is when, during the Hong Kong Riots where Apple pulled an app that assisted protesters.
Let’s not forget one of the biggest investors is a right-wing billionaire who runs a corporate intelligence agency that contracts with the DoD. And the only proof we have that he doesn’t collect data on Brave’s users is the questionable word of the devs.
Brave has been off limits for me ever since I saw my QAnon nutjob father using it lol.
I would appreciate if we don’t bring politics into the conversation. They are completely subjective and only serve to stray away from the original point.
Edit:
Yes, I’m aware I’m in the wrong here.
Privacy is a political subject.
I’ll keep using and promoting it. I consider it better than Mozilla/FF anyway. Deal with it and stop telling people what they should and shouldn’t do.
I absolutely agree, many news about security issues have already been published before.
Just disable the ads, crypto and telemetry and suddenly none of those things are a problem anymore, just like Firefox.
Brave is not spyware. That website you linked is horrible and full of misinformation. They also claim that Firefox, and even Tor Browser, are spyware. They act as if any and all connections a browser makes are automatically bad and used for spying/tracking.
I won’t disagree with the other criticisms of Brave that you made, but just wanted to point that out. That website is just highly unreliable and makes verifiably false claims about the browsers it reviews.
Just commenting to let you know I’ve clarified a bit in the post. Also, stock Firefox is spyware so.
Stock as in out-of-the-box.
Edit: If you want to downvote this go ahead, but at least know that it’s true. Without changing ANY settings, Firefox is spyware.
Just stop giving any advice please.
Brave behaving like Win XP era browser with gazillion toolbars installed, with a pinch of crypto and crypto promoting ads should be a giant red flag.
FOSS =/= trusted by default. Why are there so many FOSS evangelists, but such a damn tiny part of them are programmers, let alone programmers able to examine a source code behind such a giant codebase as web browser?
I use Vivaldi, at least their business model is clear, and developer is kind of trusted, and not crypto scammer and homophobe.
Brave was also made by a guy who got kicked out of Mozilla for being homophobic. The cryptocurrency stuff is brave also a major scam, it’s a crypto that must first be converted into another crypto before it can be converted into real money. How is that a “currency”?
its open source tho, show me the spyware and i will belive you
Why are there daily posts against Brave but not against other browsers? Is Google more trustworthy than Brave?
Because Brave likes to portray itself as privacy friendly. We already know Chrome, Edge and others aren’t.
There are many, many good reasons to not use Brave. Being spyware is not one of those.
Boycott Brave for real reasons like their CEO and owner being a raging anti-gay reactionary or because of their cryptocurrency bs.
