Use Firefox, people. Brave is shady as hell. I'll use Chrome or Edge long before I use Brave.
I ask because I feel the same but don't actually have any proof that things are shady. It is just a feeling which obviously isn't enough to convince others but is enough to put me off using it the few times I've tried.
Something about all this 'rewards' stuff just feels dodgy. No idea why I feel this, I probably read something at some point but don't recall now.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...
I get that it's unethical do it without users consent,
but I am personally OK with anyone using affiliate links for whatever I subscribe to. I don't lose anything, I don't pay for it, some company is letting other people or smaller companies increase budget. I often ask my colleagues if they can get me referral link before I signup for something. What's wrong with it?
A widget hand-made by an owner-operator in small-town USA who sells from his own website gets ignored while the Amazon-listed widget made in a Chinese sweatshop gets shilled because Amazon pays affiliates.
This can be used to track users across the web without their knowledge or consent.
However I don't know Brave's implementation here. Just answering the question in the abstract.
It has a taste of paying too much if the vendor can afford to give a fraction to the affiliate.
Of course you pay for it, it's the same thing as free shipping: the seller increases its prices to take into account how much they're going to pay to affiliates.
Well, a lot of reporting on the affiliate code situation partly mischaracterized what actually happened. There was an auto-complete suggestion that was auto-selecting when you pressed "enter", and it was fixed shortly thereafter. There is a blog post about it called "On Partner Referral Codes in Brave Suggested Sites".
That said, it does essentially the same thing Firefox does when you do a search on Firefox. Try right now: go into Firefox, type in a search in the URL bar, press enter, and you'll see it appends/"injects" a Firefox "affiliate code" as a query parameter so that Firefox gets a cut from Google. One salient difference is that Firefox's "affiliate code" is a vanity code (human readable: "?client=firefox-b-d"), so it isn't viscerally shocking.
If it read "?client=brave" like it does on Firefox, it's very likely no one would have ever cared!
[0]: https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-annoyance.txt?a=0 [1]: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AdguardTeam/FiltersRegistr...
Brave's primary customers are advertisers. While this is not evidence in itself, it is certainly something to be wary of.
Which FAQ?
This appears to be the only FAQ that mentions anonymized data:
> Will Brave sell user data to advertisers?
>
> We do not have access to identifiable user data. The anonymized aggregated ad campaign related data we do collect is used for accounting and reporting, but this data cannot be mapped back to devices or user identities of any kind. Learn more
If you follow the "Learn more" link it says:
> If you switch on Brave Rewards and switch on ads (in Rewards settings) you will see ad notifications, and will receive BAT to reward you for viewing these ads.
It seems like it's off by default?
So like Firefox?
Do they collect your history? No. Then good
Firefox does too.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22510008
TL;DR It's an ad company posing as a privacy company. Brave replaces other ads with Brave's, created a crypto currency for the purpose of sharing profits with website owners, but in reality pockets almost all of the money since site owners rarely become aware of it [0] or more likely because it's spread so thin across the web that few sites reach the 100$ threshold.
Why "of course"? Keep your signing key off the repo, but you can very much keep them open source too.
It's run by one of the principle Firefox devs (Eich) and none of the stories about it ripping people off or being insecure appear to have been well founded.
I've used all the major browsers, starting with Mosaic and Netscape, was there when FF was phoenix, have been writing websites for 20 years (only a small amount of that time commercially). YMMV but it seems trustworthy, privacy focused, fast enough (ie I can't tell if it's different in performance terms).
It's just reskinned Chrome with privacy extensions built in and a system to enable people to try and send micropayments to sites if the sites are signed up.
It's not reminiscent of Eclipse in anyway for me (mind Eclipse to me most evokes poor DE integration, I'm a long time KDE user, and having a billion settings).
Use the browser that pleases you most though.
Plus, and I have no evidence of this apart the synchronized hype they do for the browser, but I'm pretty sure Brave is secretly bankrolling those very... political... Linux YouTubers.
I do enjoy the irony that Mozilla seems to have gone downhill ever since he left / got kicked out. The people replacing him, IIRC, aren't as knowledgeable or expert as he was. But then, I am somewhat a fan of pure meritocracy.
Of course (to reply to downvoted up-comment), we don't and never did "[replace] ads on sites you visit". But when it comes to evil-me, making false claims is justified? Seems so!
Sometimes the users on this site sound like they are drowning, but when you throw them a like jacket, they push it away as they complain about the colour.
As for "modify user's input without their consent", go type keywords into any browser, Firefox Safari Chrome Edge etc. You'll see search affiliate client code, same as we had by mistake for the two binance domains, and only as suggestions for other partners (all of this, we removed in the springtime, to quell concerns and misrepresentations such as you make here).
We do not "accept money" as intermediary, the browser holds the tips to unverified creators. You seem to be operating on misinformation here. In December 2018 we briefly shipped a system that sent our own funds when directed, back to us, on behalf of unverified creators. That too was a mistake, but we fix bugs and so such tips are now buffered client-side. In any case, we were the source of funds there, not the user.
We've taken great pains with Brave Ads (not an "ad network" by the way) to avoid any privacy problems, starting by making them opt-in, using in-browser-only data matched against a fixed-per-population-per-day catalog, confirmed via Privacy Pass (blind signature cryptographi). This is the wave of the future, even Google is trying to do a Privacy Sandbox now, but they are piling up risks and letting partners into the sandbox last I looked.
It's clear you have some underlying problem with us, but it isn't based on the facts. What's the story?
Firefox feeds itself in the hand of Google. They won't do anything that will make Google less dominant.
A company taking money on your behalf without notification, while slimy, isn't mining.