IMO a company built around selling personalized ads with information collected from search and browser activity is at odds with creating a privacy first experience.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure who you'd prefer. If we're pushing Firefox here, I'd strongly recommend folks compare and contrast Brave's policies with Firefox: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#how-is-your-d...
Take special care to read through the section called "To serve relevant content and advertising on Firefox New Tab".
I think this is exactly backwards, they are a business first and all other messaging is marketing to support that end. I recognize there is likely nothing that can be said to change your opinion if you have faith Brave is putting your interests above their own.
If you do compare to the firefox privacy policy, the most notable difference is how specific Mozilla is about what data is collected and how it is used.
In contrast, try to find any detail about the specific information collected by the brave browser and how it is used to serve ads.
Google Chrome is a frog-boiling exercise where they slowly take away freedoms to run, for example, ad-blocking in the browser and they do so under the name of security. They've already tried to push the web integrity initiative. They'll try again.
Mozilla, as I've already pointed out, is criminally mismanaged in the sense of poor allocation of resources towards building a better browser. On top of this, they have brought in a number of executives from Meta that have made a number of changes that erode the privacy of Firefox users. They can't ship any features that are hostile to Google directly because Google is their primary source of funding.
Safari is written by a company that has no vested interest in seeing the web be good enough to replace native apps because that company makes gobs of money being a middleman selling native apps.
Vivaldi is closed source.
LibreWolf, IronFox, WaterFox, Icecat, Cromite, Ungoogled Chromium are all similar in that they are drafting the work of the multinational corporations, but ultimately are volunteer efforts that are sustainable only as long as the volunteers continue to donate their time.
Brave is essentially trying to create a business doing what those privacy-focused browsers are doing. The challenge is they somehow need to monetize without compromising privacy, which has been a continual challenge for every browser manufacturer.
Again, I'm going to say it for the third time in this thread: the version of Brave that I use doesn't collect telemetry or serve ads because I paid for it. I can verify its behavior because it's also open source. Not a single person has responded to this very simple fact.
Chrome and Safari can’t be trusted because the profit model of the parent company is at odds with building a user first browser.
Firefox cannot be trusted because they work on too many unrelated projects.
Open source alternatives cannot be trusted because they don’t try to profit off of users.
Brave is good though, despite having a profit model directly at odds with a privacy first browser and working on many unrelated projects (multiple browser versions, a search engine, and a VPN, a cryptocurrency) even though they are smaller than Mozilla.
The fact that you can pay for a version that doesn’t sell your habits to advertisers goes against the point you are trying to make. Other than Google, every other browser does that by default for free, and even Google offers chromium for free.
We disagree about the facts on this, and it's a waste of time to argue facts, but I do appreciate the discussion!