this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Privacy

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Please, do not use Brave. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.

Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.

Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.

After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL's. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.

Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I'd say the answer is a very clear no.

One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.

Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don't mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Look, just… just use fire fox! Sure some sights aren’t optimized for it, but it’s a minor difference in performance from a chromium based browser.

And the more people use fire fox the more sights will have a reason to optimize for it.

Anything that is using chromium is still using something built by Google, and thus if Google tries to alter chromium to make ad blockers stop working, or some other asinine idea, there isn’t much a browser can do about it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Use librewolf instead of Firefox to get rid of the whole spyware part of it. Librewolf only has a single request when starting, to "check for updates". But using Firefox is the second best thing you can do both for your privacy and to fight Google's " Web Environment Integrity" crap.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I personally use Librewolf, can agree with this.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

What would you use for Android phones?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Mull is pretty good from what I've heard. I think GrapheneOS comes with it's own browser built in.

[–] shym3q 3 points 1 year ago

mull or fennec

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Firefox is also really good on Android these days. I use that with all the usual ad blocking and privacy extensions I have on desktop.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Sites*, not sights.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

and 80% of firefox's revenue is JUST Google. we are fighting an uphill battle here