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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

Not sure there are necessarily third parties involved, but given Brave's track record of lying about not tracking users (whilst actually inserting affiliate links onto websites they visited and collecting revenues and data from them) as well as lying about donations they solicited going to the parties whose name they solicited them in, I don't see why any privacy-conscious person should trust them

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Passing an affiliate code doesn’t mean they’re tracking the individual, it’s just meant to get credit for sales they’ve driven. Affiliates just get a payout of commission from the merchant, there’s no data-sharing beyond that. Affiliate cookies can be cleared by wiping browser cookies whereas Google’s data-mining (as present in Chrome) can’t be stopped.

Affiliate marketing is means to generate revenue and a better than taking massive payouts from Google, which is the primary funding source for Mozilla Firefox.

As a privacy conscious user I’d rather see a browser that be sustained without Google’s support. Given the co-creator of Mozilla (and .JS) is behind Brave, I trust it more than the fly by night browser.

Brave is absolutely dependent on Google, now and in the future, continuing to release their millions of dollars of engineering effort on Chromium to the public for free. If Google were to stop updating Chromium, Brave could re-architect onto... what, exactly? Firefox becomes a less viable competitor every time Mozilla issues a press release. Perhaps they could revert to Webkit, which would make them 100% dependent on Apple instead. It's sad, but there is no way for a modern browser vendor to be independent of FAANG.

That's like saying using linux is being dependent on redhat and intel. Big contributors to Chromium include Microsoft, Samsung and many other giant companies. If Google abandons Chromium, it will still be maintained by other companies as too many in the industry rely on it.

Chromium seems like one of the least-likely-to-be-killed Google projects.

Chromium isn't developed by Google alone; it has many contributors. Brave doesn't rely on Google. If they stopped contributing to Chromium, we could continue without them.

On the subject of Mozilla, they could very well integrate a news reader through Pocket as it already has my interests with label!

Pocket now shows recommendations base on popular saves, but a proper news aggregator for daily news could serve Mozilla and its customers well considering Pocket is tightly integrated within Firefox.

A banner of Firefox currently shows that 703 million links were saved on Pocket this year alone.

It's a perfectly legitimate way for a browser vendor to generate revenue and far from the most intrusive collection of data on internet usage, but you can't honestly claim to be a privacy conscious browser that removes all tracking and fingerprinting codes whilst surreptitiously inserting codes for the specific purpose of enabling third parties to send you money based on use of your browser. The 'sorry, but we thought leaving the source code for people to scrutinise was the appropriate level of disclosure' attitude doesn't exactly inspire confidence they won't make a worse 'mistake' next time either.

If you really want to avoid being tracked, you probably want a more robust solution than simply choosing the browser vendor that's least honest about its monetisation strategy, and you're particularly unlikely to want to be getting browser history based feed recommendations from your browser vendor's CDN anyway

That doesn't make any sense. The code from affiliate sales has nothing to do with you, the end user. It identifies the affiliate, in this case Brave. There is no user information there. Their claim then is in perfectly good faith.

I think you're confusing BAT with the affiliate links which are two distinct things Brave has done. BAT I agree with you on there is still tracking there or otherwise they wouldn't be able to attribute the money to you. Affiliate links though do not have the same connotation and is the subject under discussion in this comment chain.

The code doesn't identify the user as an individual, but it does inform Brave when its users visit particular third party websites (if they use its URL bar autocomplete), much like many supposedly anonymised analytics services privacy-conscious users often prefer to block.

And the actual discussion subject I raised isn't the horrors of affiliate links and affiliates accessing metadata on trends in their user base's access to certain third party websites so much as Brave's history of "mistakes". The BAT might require considerably more storage of personal data, but at least its existence isn't a secret

Please see my response to your list of "mistakes". You claimed that Brave tracked users, modified links on pages, and more. All of that, without exception, is false. Brave (the company) doesn't know what sites you visit. Brave is considered the most private browser in terms of phoning home: https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow.... Please feel free to inspect your own network traffic from the browser via Fiddler.

In what sense have they driven the sales? By being the browser?

You went to a site, and in this case they facilitated the browsing to the website :)

It’s no different than the terrible browser addons that claim they’re helping you find coupon, while stuffing affiliate cookies into your session to generate commission (and also selling your data)

No different than something terrible is also terrible...

> . Affiliates just get a payout of commission from the merchant, there’s no data-sharing beyond that.

Consider that LTT shows a spreadsheet of all the Amazon items bought of a specific item in their video "I can SEE what you Bought Online", and it includes the quantity, price, and date in which it was bought:

https://youtu.be/gHHyqoU8sQM?t=310

Affiliate links were in the address bar and not injected into the webpage. You are spreading lies.

You are correct and it's equally as awful.

Equally as harmless. The affiliate codes don’t give anyone any information that they don’t already have (if you’re one of whatever tiny fraction of users edit their user agent strings, why the heck would you choose to accept the the URL suggestions‽ And if you really care about strict privacy, why would you use a Chromium-based browser in the first place, when invasive features have been discovered in Chromium’s codebase long after they were added before?). The sheer stupidity of the toxic FUD people spread about Brave makes me angry in its behalf (despite never using it beyond a test run myself).

Showing suggestions in the browser isn't "equally as awful" as injecting them into pages (or modifying links on pages, as was claimed). The intent here was for users of Brave [who also happen to have an interest in product/service x] to support the former with their traffic to the latter. This isn't unethical; it's an clean and privacy-respecting way of supporting an effort.

You're mistaken, or misleading. Brave has never tracked users, and Brave has also never inserted affiliate links into websites. Let's discuss these claims in a bit more depth.

TRACKING

Brave doesn't track users. I invite anybody reading to take a look at their network activity; in fact, I'll sit down and give anybody an introductory walk-through of Telerik Fiddler and show them how to inspect their own network activity, to observe in plain-text what Brave is doing, and with whom it is communicating. I do this regularly, and share results [1]. You don't have to take my word on it either; unaffiliated third-parties have published similar results [2].

[1] https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...

AFFILIATE LINKS

Brave has never "inserted affiliate links onto website". This is quite misleading. What Brave did do was offer users who were performing a search from the address bar of the browser a list of suggested results. Among those results, Brave would at times show an affiliate option.

We wrote about this on our blog (and included screenshots) for those interested [3]. Note, no data was involved. No network requests were made. There was no impact to privacy in any way, shape, or form. This was simply a suggestion offered in a drop-down beneath the address bar.

Affiliate links are a clean way for browsers (or any app, really) to generate revenue. Open up Firefox, Vivaldi, or Opera and type 'hacker news' into the address bar. In Firefox, you'll be redirected to https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hacker+ne... by default. Note the "client=firefox" in the query-string parameter list. In Opera you're sent to https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=hacker+news&sou... by default. Note the "client=opera" and "sourceid=opera" elements.

Brave's mistake was matching a fully-qualified domain name. What we had planned for was showing a set of suggested URLs (some with an affiliate code) when a user searched for something like "binance". We mistakenly showed the same results when the user typed a fully-qualified domain name, like "binance.us" as well. That was unintended, and was corrected within 48 hours of identification.

[3] https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/

SOLICITING DONATIONS

Brave is doing something quite different from other browsers; it aims to not only improve security on the Web, but also to offer novel support options to content creators everywhere in a privacy-respecting, and sustainable manner.

Brave ships with a Tipping interface to empower users to send rewards (in the form of Basic Attention Tokens) to content creators. When we launched this model, Brave gave tokens to its users, and users could give those to the sites they visit. When a user tipped a site, the tokens would go to the Creator (if verified), or into a settlement wallet to be claimed at a later date. Brave would reach out to Creators, informing them of rewards (similar to the early days of PayPal).

There were a couple issues here, which you can read about on our blog [4]. One was a UI issue. Brave marked verified domains with a checkmark (similar to Twitter's 'verified' accounts). We didn't have any special mark for non-verified properties. This was naive on our part. We remedied this by explicitly stating the status of the Creator in both cases.

The second problem was allowing tokens to move out of the user's wallet when the Creator wasn't even verified. Personally, I'm incredibly thankful that this issue was found. Under that model, tons of tokens could be dropped into a wallet, and never claimed by anybody. In the update we produced within a couple days), this model was changed. Now unverified creators wouldn't receive anything; instead, tips issued to an unverified creator would stay on your device, and be retried for up to 90 days. If the Creator verified within that timeframe, they'd collect the tips. If they didn't, the tips could be sent to somebody else.

Brave never solicited tips for anybody. There was simply a component of the browser which enabled users to send tips to sites and creators they appreciated. Brave's main fault here was with naive UI, and a contribution model which could have resulted in lost tokens. Thankfully, our users caught both issues and we were able to improve the feature quickly.

[4] https://brave.com/rewards-update/

I hope this helps.

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