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Comment by _eht | Hacker News Reader

Brave, I wish I liked you more. As much as I am cautious with trusting Google, your motives and history are somehow more questionable to me.

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What in Brave’s history and motives are questionable?

Some time ago there was a scandal because apparently they create profiles for content creators which aren't signed up on their platform and accept money on their behalf. Afterwards Brave spouted very dubious arguments with things like ominous legalese to HN comments with an "trust us, we're nerds too" vibe.

From a cynical perspective, it looked a lot like smoke and mirrors from an entity currently sitting on a pile of money acquired by impersonating people.

Isn't this anyway their own tokens? So no matter whether the providers do have an own account or not, if they don't cash it out then there's no cost to brave. So its.just that they were incorrectly giving the impression that someone is getting paid?

Yes, except when that person doesn't get paid, instead Brave gets that money.

That's not true. The tokens are returned the user. Those tokens may come from the User Growth Pool as well.

You can use Firefox.

Firefox uses Google Analytics in web based parts of its UI.

Use PaleMoon, Basilisk, or IceCat.

I'm far more sceptical of Google. Brave's movitvation is to supply privacy compliant browser as an alternative to Chrome. Google's motivation is to sell ads and hoard data on people.

Brave's motivation is to push people to use their browser in order to further their extortion based business model.

> Brave's motivation is to push people to use their browser in order to further their extortion based business model.

Thats Google. Google store information on you -- Brave don't really have data centres of peoples search history and profile info. My big problem with Brave is -- it just simply isn't a good browser yet. It doesn't work properly with lots of sites I use e.g. teamwork.com

What’s their extortion based business model? I thought their deal was they pay sites with their schrutebucks based on user monthly pay-in (ie, I pay $10/month, I spend 50% of my time on HN, therefore HN gets $5 minus Brave’s 30% or whatever).

If participation in the program was purely under completely voluntary terms then it would be fine but it isn't. Instead Brave extorts sites to participate in their program by blocking their current funding method and forcing Brave's terms upon them if they want to recover some of the lost revenue.

Sounds like a court case waiting to happen...

While no true lawsuit yet, there have been cease-and-desist sent:

https://www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-publishers-send-ce...

Most recently (as far as big news goes) it turns out Brave collects donations even if content creators don't participate. AFAIK it's an opt-out feature right now, not opt-in. So Brave is putting donation buttons on YouTuber pages, which only allows the Brave user to donate BAT (Basic Attention Tokens - an altcoin that Brave created on Ethereum), and they hold them until the YouTuber claims it. They also take certain BAT back from the YouTuber if it's not claimed within a year - but those are the free BAT that they give out to Brave users to encourage adoption. BAT donated to YouTubers that the Brave user bought themselves stays in an escrow for now.

https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1076160753793683456?ref_...

"Brave extorts sites to participate in their program by blocking their current funding method" is an interesting rephrasing of "Brave has a build-in adblocker."

Sounds like one of those a descriptions of technology you hear in the news from some ancient company's legal team, invented to explain some run-of-the-mill technology (that's not going away) using a prior era's analogy. ie "Stealing a file on the internet".

Not wrong, though.

I was under the impression they decided on Stanley nickels.

If your business is based on fraud, malware and emotional manipulation, you don't get to complain about extortion.

Can you provide a complete list of which immoral actions by one party do and don't justify immoral actions by others? Or is it if someone acts immorally any action is response is therefore moral?

Nothing ever justifies an immoral action. If it's justified, it's not immoral.

If your business actively harms society -- as advertising does -- complaining about extortion, which is merely a zero-sum game, is hypocritical.

Brave's business model also depends on advertising.

The GP was critical of both Brave and Google. There was nothing hypocritical about their statement.

I meant that Google would be hypocritical, not the GP.

Are you saying extortion doesn't harm society?

No, you hallucinated the words "zero-sum game".

Can you fill us in?

Their motives here are not questionable. Everyone knows exactly what their motives are. Google makes Chrome, a competitor to Brave. Also, Brave’s whole schtick is that it is better on privacy than other browsers. So their motive to make this complaint was simple and self-serving: they are trying to take their competitor down and use the publicity from it to boost their business. This isn’t the first abuse of GDPR by a jealous competitor, and it won’t be the last.

Intentionally or not, GDPR was designed in a way that will drive complaints and cross complaints by competitors large and small, across the world. As companies realize how easy it is to weaponize GDPR to impose significant defense costs on competitors at no cost to themselves, regardless of the legitimacy of their complaint, filing such complaints will become a competitive necessity.

You should learn more about Brave. Those were two large paragraphs full of ignorance.

Are they not competing with Chrome? Also, you literally raised the exact same concern I did in another comment:

”Brave, I wish I liked you more. As much as I am cautious with trusting Google, your motives and history are somehow more questionable to me.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19990086

You seem to agree with me, at least when you aren’t replying to a comment of mine. Where is the disconnect here?

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