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Comment by whyleyc | Hacker News Reader

Can you share examples of Brave having a poor privacy record?

I've recently switched to it as my main browser, enjoy using it and have recommended to others who want to opt-out of the Google ecosystem. However, if there are examples of privacy abuse I may revisit.

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Brave converted urls into affiliate links: https://www.coindesk.com/brave-browsers-affiliate-link-contr...

Vivaldi is a pretty good chromium-based browser, if you want to stay away from Google but still need chromium. I'd still take Firefox any day, though.

Monitoring users without violating their privacy is the point of Brave. Affiliate links do not violate the integrity or the privacy of the browsing experience. These are great things, it keeps the browser free from cost while still protecting your privacy. It is how they continue to exist without financial support from Google.

Every Google search/purchase through Firefox that can be attributed back to FF funds Mozilla. No different really.

We should be careful with the "monitoring users" statement; no user data is sent to Brave. Any "monitoring" is done locally, by the browser itself. The browser doesn't pass user data off to Brave (the company) or any other third parties.

Yeah, so Vivaldi or Brave? Is Vivaldi slower than Brave? I used Vivaldi for a while but Brave was so much faster than Vivaldi for me. Could it be because of the loads of history and whatnot in Vivaldi? Maybe it is possible that I could make it much faster by just deleting everything apart from bookmarks.

Edit: I deleted everything apart from cookies. Vivaldi feels much faster now. I think equally as fast as Brave.

Nevermind, Brave is actually much faster.

>Brave converted urls into affiliate links

True, and they reversed course after (quite fairly) being called out on it.

But, that incident has nothing to do with privacy.

Brave offered search suggestions [in the UI of the browser]. Our mistake was doing this for fully-qualified domains. We fixed that quickly. As for Vivaldi and Firefox, do me a favor and open either one. Search "hacker news" from the address bar, and check the resulting page.

Firefox: google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hacker+news

Vivaldi: bing.com/search?FORM=INCOH2&PC=IFJ1&PTAG=ICO-c9d0fc87&q=hacker%20news

Note how both of the browsers you suggested here added affiliate tags onto the URL. In Brave, the user could see the affiliate code before navigating. Not so in the browsers you suggest as "pretty good" and worth taking "any day".

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