this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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861
Why I recommend against Brave. (thelibre.news)
submitted 2 weeks ago by Tea to c/[email protected]
313 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it's even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (13 children)

This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don't want to however, here is a summary of the key points:

  • Brendan Eich's anti-LGBTQ+ political involvement

    • Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.

  • 2016 — Brave Browser promises to replace webpage ads

    • Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as "blatantly illegal".

  • 2018 — Brave runs a questionable donation campaign

    • Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.

  • 2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets

    • Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.

  • 2020 — Brave puts ads in user's home screens

    • Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.

  • 2021 - Brave ships an insecure Tor feature

    • Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests

  • 2023 - Brave hides their crawlers to websites

    • Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google's crawler.

  • 2024 - So-called "privacy browser" deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection

    • Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.

  • And More!

    • Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to "Forget the Fox". When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
    • The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
    • Brendan Eich's feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be "independent".

Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Oof. It seems that most of the users simply don't care.

[–] mke 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Might be nicer if they just didn't care.

Check the comment section for the video version of this article by Niccolò, or the comment section of the post on r/browsers, or the replies whenever these issues are mentioned on Twitter, and so on, and you'll find a bunch of brave people saying stuff like:

you unintentionally just made me like brave over firefox. now i can switch to a chromium based browser and not even feel bad about it

Yes i am installing Brave after this advertisment!

Thanks to this video I deleted Brave then redownloaded it

These were taken directly from the video. They're on the mild side. Throw in also some "stop inserting politics (other than mine) into tech" comments, and a few homophobes not even trying to hide it. Rather than not caring, many of them like it a lot, especially the right-wing politics.

I don't think every Brave user is a cunt, but fucking hell, are loud cunts seemingly attracted to Brave.

To folks bothered by this: know that the lead developer of Ladybird is a big fan of Brendan Eich.

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