festivecake

Copying from another comment:

Well, a lot of reporting on the affiliate code situation partly mischaracterized what actually happened. There was an auto-complete suggestion that was auto-selecting when you pressed "enter", and it was fixed shortly thereafter. There is a blog post about it called "On Partner Referral Codes in Brave Suggested Sites".

That said, it does essentially the same thing Firefox does when you do a search on Firefox. Try right now: go into Firefox, type in a search in the URL bar, press enter, and you'll see it appends/"injects" a Firefox "affiliate code" as a query parameter so that Firefox gets a cut from Google. One salient difference is that Firefox's "affiliate code" is a vanity code (human readable: "?client=firefox-b-d"), so it isn't viscerally shocking.

If it read "?client=brave" like it does on Firefox, it's very likely no one would have ever cared!

This comment is just irresponsible.

>Different flavour of mystery sauce

There's no "mystery sauce". It's completely open-source.

>You're still having all the analytics captured, it just goes to somebody with far less scrutiny than Google.

Brave's completely open about its analytics, and they're designed specially to be privacy-preserving. (No, it's not some naive "anonymous identifier".)

https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/

And you can also turn them completely off.

It doesn't. That comment is just irresponsibly false.

This is the extent of Brave's analytics: https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/

You can also disable it completely.

Well, a lot of reporting on the affiliate code situation partly mischaracterized what actually happened. There was an auto-complete suggestion that was auto-selecting when you pressed "enter", and it was fixed shortly thereafter. There is a blog post about it called "On Partner Referral Codes in Brave Suggested Sites".

That said, it does essentially the same thing Firefox does when you do a search on Firefox. Try right now: go into Firefox, type in a search in the URL bar, press enter, and you'll see it appends/"injects" a Firefox "affiliate code" as a query parameter so that Firefox gets a cut from Google. One salient difference is that Firefox's "affiliate code" is a vanity code (human readable: "?client=firefox-b-d"), so it isn't viscerally shocking.

If it read "?client=brave" like it does on Firefox, it's very likely no one would have ever cared!