https://securityboulevard.com/2019/02/brave-browser-sacrific...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3284076/brave-browser-...
https://community.brave.com/t/does-brave-inject-buttons-onto...
https://twitter.com/vj_chidambaram/status/107647481470831001...
Your second link suggests Brave replaces ads on websites; this is also wrong. Brave removes harmful third-party ads and trackers (as these harvest user data, and violate privacy). Brave offers an alternative model (Brave's privacy-respecting opt-in model) instead, which reward users with 70% of the associated revenue, while leaving their data untouched.
Your third link is, I believe, asking about our in-situ tipping buttons. These are triggers for the Tipping panel within Brave, enabling you to tip BAT to users on Twitter, GitHub, and elsewhere. I'm not sure what concerns you about this; these can be turned off in brave://rewards, if you like.
The last link you provided is also quite misleading. Brave distributed BAT grants to users, enabling those users to earmark tokens for content creators. Our interface at the time identified "verified" creators as such, but didn't make an equally explicit identification of unverified creators. This lead to some confusion. But as a result of Tom Scott's feedback in 2018, we saw massive improvements made to our UI/UX and tipping model over 48 hours or so. Today unverified creators are clearly identified as such, and tips are held for them on the user's device, rather than in a settlement wallet. See also https://brave.com/rewards-update/
1. https://securityboulevard.com/2019/02/brave-browser-sacrific... Brave has a whitelist for some facebook urls for loading scripts from third party domains. Found the brave community thread imaged in the post: https://community.brave.com/t/how-to-disable-facebook-twitte... My read of this thread is not having the whitelist breaks authentication using facebook and they offer an extension to remove the whitelist.
2. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3284076/brave-browser-... This is about the opt-in basic attention token system, where users can replace ads served by websites with ones that reward them with cryptocurrency. I have used brave for a while and don't use this system (using the built in ad block instead). I don't see this as a negative.
3. https://community.brave.com/t/does-brave-inject-buttons-onto... This is about some piece of the basic attention token system that apparently injects tip buttons into websites. I don't use the basic attention token system so this does not impact me.
4. https://twitter.com/vj_chidambaram/status/107647481470831001... This is apparently about the basic attention token system donation feature not sending out donations that do not meet a threshold. Again, I do not use this system. But I saw this mentioned by someone else in one of the comments on this post and the response mentioned Brave has changed their policies to refund people within 90 days if the donation is not claimed.
1. We whitelist scripts to load, so as to enable Facebook and Twitter posts to be embedded into other sites. But, we don't whitelist/enable the tracking aspect of these scripts. We block them from accessing cookies and other local storage. You can modify this behavior in brave://settings/socialBlocking
2. Brave has never replaced ads on pages. We block harmful, third-party ads and trackers. And, separately, we offer a privacy-respecting digital advertising model. As you point out, our model of showing ad notifications is opt-in.
3. These are harmless tip-triggers shown near Tweets, GitHub comments, and more. Similar to what you would see with an extension like Pocket, where buttons are added near items so you can add them to a reading list, etc.
4. Tips made to unverified creators remain in the user's wallet. There's no threshold requirement here; if you tip 1 BAT to a verified creator, that tip will go out immediately. If you tip 1 BAT to an unverified creator, it will remain in your wallet for up to 90 days.
2.
I think everyone's threshold for what constitutes breach of trust is different. If you accept content injection, unreported whitelists and other similar behaviour from a browser which touts privacy as its selling point ok, then thats your call. But this kind of behaviour is unacceptable from my and many other people's perspective. Which other major browser injects any content in to a website without the users request? Do you see people being ok with being impersonated by Brave without their knowledge? Especially when these mistakes just seem to keep happening, at some point you have to question the intention. Again maybe you are ok with it, but people should be informed about these practices and make their own call. To most people, this is not ok. What other browser has had this level of controversy (outside of chrome possibly) and they have been in business longer than brave.