That was addressed in my comment (the one you're responding to) with this link:
https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
Briefly, we added a way for users to support Brave without having to make financial contributions. They could simply opt to use one of our affiliate codes for a few poplar sites/services.
We added a feature to Brave which responded to user search input, and offered affiliate links for relevant results. You can see a screenshot of what that looked like at https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png. This didn't involve any user data, didn't rewrite links on pages, didn't redirect network requests, or touch the area of privacy/security in any way. Seemed like a good idea :)
When the feature actually launched, users quickly realized that the logic was handling fully qualified URLs in additional to search input. You can see a screenshot of that at https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image2-1.png. This was the mistake that needed to be corrected.
I hope that helps clarify things a little. Again, there was no impact to user data or privacy, and Brave made $0 on this feature. Thankfully, our community is attentive, and yields prompt feedback when mistakes are made. Fortunately we were able to resolve the issue quickly and get a fix out to users.