Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ALittleLight | Hacker News Reader

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I use Brave. It's basically chrome with a built-in ad blocker. I have no experience of Brave "pushing" their cryptocurrency, which I don't use and not using it hasn't negatively impacted me in any way. I think I see an option for it on the "new tab" screen, but that's it.

As for valuing profits over privacy - I was just reading an old Scott Alexander post on inconsistent rigor. Do you apply this standard to everything? You don't work with any company that values profits over privacy? Or, perhaps, when you dislike a company do you bring out strong criticism that would equally impeach almost every other company you do business with?

Brave is a good browser and a decent search engine. I use the search about 60/40 with Google and I hope that grows over time.

Since we're indulging in conspiracy theories here, I'll just throw out that mine is that you have ideological motives to dislike Brave and those motivate your criticism. Which is fine, I have ideological reasons to dislike Google, I just don't pretend that Google services are bad.

>Since we're indulging in conspiracy theories here

Are you Brave's native marketing arm at work? When I open up wireshark and I see telemetry sent back to Brave after I open the browser, must be a conspiracy right?

I find it funny that you did not even try to refute the points about them impersonating people to sell their products or the telemetry in their browser. You instead deflected into a combination of "whatabout-ism" and then say the same vague positive statements "Brave is a good browser and a decent search engine."

I think Brave is shady, explain to me why they are not using technical merit. I will fully admit that I may not know all the facts, and I'm willing to hear you out, so explain why they impersonate people to sell their product.

>Do you apply this standard to everything?

Yes, if a company markets one thing, I expect them to deliver on that marketing promise. Brave markets privacy, and they do not deliver.

>I'll just throw out that mine is that you have ideological motives to dislike Brave and those motivate your criticism.

Explain further. What is my motivation here? That I'm tired of the Brave spam? That I want a browser that is actually private, like Librewolf or Ungoogled Chromium?

When I was young I was stung by a scorpion that had been hiding in my dirty clothes. My father told me "This is why you should clean your room. The scorpions won't have so many places to hide." I told him that I would rather be stung by a scorpion once a year (or so) than do the ceaseless work of keeping my room clean. I feel the same about the kind of privacy concerns you are raising here.

Maybe Brave telemetry is reporting stuff I don't care about - time spent in the browser, number of tabs open, crashes, etc. Maybe Brave telemetry is secretly smuggling data I do care about and they are using that for nefarious purposes. I would rather deal with occasionally being stung by the latter than spend my time worrying about it and restricting myself to open source, carefully audited, minimal risk tools.

As far as impersonating people to sell their products, I don't really know what you mean. I'm guessing it's something about them creating profiles to receive BAT tokens on their behalf until such time as those people joined the Brave ecosystem (if they do). I see this as a "growth hack" and maybe distasteful but not a deal breaker.

TBH most the concern is overblown - anonymous-ish (there's always something someone can do) be default and easy to toggle off and the source is aviaible

all of the developers i've interacted with at brave have also been pretty chill

there's not as much news about other browsers here because they aren't doing much newsworthy, like this article growing a search engine

The only thing missing from your post is

“- sent from Google Chrome”

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