Social media is also a savior for many kids while perverse high school social dynamics implant a dystopian foundation of the world, affecting perceptions into adulthood and often for the rest of their lives. This all sounds a bit like a near-sighted appeal to antiquity to me.
Afraid to ever use TurboTax after it put me into a multi-year audit cycle. I was also paying for maximally upgraded plan with all insurance and everything.
This is the thing everyone always points to when they hand wave "a lot of other shady things" - not sure why folks generally like to FUD Brave. I was working there when this issue happened and it was a very big deal internally and was patched immediately. FWIW I got zero hint that this was some kind of shady thing someone would have been trying to sneak in.
The lesson repeats itself weekly on HN: Don't build anything that sits in an app store unless you are BFFs with someone at the store. This is tech oligarchy.
Interestingly this is likely for privacy reasons in a roundabout way. Brave doesn't connect to Google and so had to implement much of the serverside functionality (updates, sync etc) itself.
Suggest everyone here read up on Brave - internally the care for privacy is much higher than Mozilla [I have worked for both] and things like P3A liked here are carefully designed to avoid leaking PII and implemented honestly somewhat begrudgingly.
Fully expected this to be about SV's shitty deal /ponziesque living/vc situation but I guess Wired does Wired. (Not saying they are remotely wrong about any of this.)