I’ve been using Brave for the past three or so years but I do know that Linux/privacy enthusiasts tend to swear by Firefox. Wanted to get people’s thoughts on this topic to see if I should be making a potential switch. Thanks!

  • 133arc585English
    6•1 year ago

    Depends on what you call a scam. I am not sure it’s the right word, but duplicitous behavior and definite privacy violations (even if by negligence) are absolutely true.

    They have sent out direct mailers that basically equated to a customer list leak; also I’d take a peek at the wikipedia entry about their business model, which mentions some stuff that isn’t the most savory:

    … Brave earns revenue from ads by taking a 15% cut of publisher ads and a 30% cut of user ads. User ads are notification-style pop-ups, while publisher ads are viewed on or in association with publisher content.

    On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users navigate to Binance

    In regards to the mailers, they messed up and passed blame,

    In this process, our EDDM vendor made a significant mistake by not excluding names, but instead including names before addresses, resulting in the distribution of personalized mailers.

    With regards to the CEO, he made a donation to an anti-LGBT cause when he was CEO of Mozilla in 2008. He lost his job at Mozilla due to his anti-LGBT stance.

    He also spreads COVID misinformation.

    • VoxelEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Tbh. Mozilla wasn’t better in the past and as long it doesn’t affect the product I don’t mind the political views of the owner (it’s still concerning). As long Brave can provide me better privacy and security for my daily browsing I will continue using and recommending it. And listening to Wikipedia he stepped back, by himself.

    • @Unlucky_Boot3467English
      -12•1 year ago

      Really loving how a CEO’s political views somehow fucking matter the security of a browser lmao. God I fucking hate this generation

      • @[email protected]English
        8•1 year ago

        It’s just a conversation dude, you can make your point without the need for Reddit style aggression.

        The views of those CEO can in some instances be important, those in charge shape the direction of the company and ultimately the product. Look at Twitter for example, once a place of relative free speech, but now controlled by a CEO who bans users he personally doesn’t like, demotes content that doesn’t fit his beliefs, and prevents linking to other services like Mastodon/Lemmy/Instagram.

        I’m not claiming it would, but whose to say similar censorship wouldn’t happen with Brave? The CEO has already injected content into webpages and redirected links for monetisation purposes, what if more nefarious actions were taken for content he doesn’t agree with?