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?
You must log in or register to comment.
The CEO of brave is a homophobic bigot if that helps push anyone over the edge for changing their browser. It was the last straw for me.
This post shows that it’s much worse than that.
That was the headliner reason for me.
The rest was just ‘Alright, it isn’t enough this guy is a piece of shit, he’s pushing a shitty product.’
God damnit.
Every browser I switched to since Firefox has been a good user experience, and then I find out some horrible bullshit.
Is there any safe browser that isn’t run by hateful assholes?
I’m waiting on Ladybird to come out next year into alpha
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 donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.
-
- 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”.
-
- 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.
-
- Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.
-
- Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
I don’t use Brave as my main browser but I think some of the accusations are not fair.
- TOR Feature. I don’t think it was deliberately done. Similarly Firefox revealed your up address even if you used VPN while using. As long as there was no malicious intent we can’t say anything other than that they software has big bugs.
- Yes, it is questionable what they do for getting money but same can be said for most donations or schemes that FOSS use. There was long discussions about the money Mozilla receives from Google, or things Opera did (basically similar to Brave)
- Getting news from right wing is useful if you ever need to do research, I had a course in uni about anti-islam and getting really right wings news was difficult. We all knew the same 2 sites.
- The political opinion of the CEO is concerning but not important enough. In that case I’m wholly on the same boat as the developer of the Factorio, if Hitler were to make good Browsers I’d use them.
- It is also important to note most of the problems are in the past. Sure it means there are likely a lot we could not find and it is annoying to use a product where they would exploit you if they are given a chance.
That said Brave is still #1 Browser I’d recommend someone installing. If I can I’d install Firefox myself, but on the phone it is what I recommend. I don’t trust my uncle to install Firefox and install uBlock etc. on top of it. But I trust him to install Brave and use it.
Most privacy minded Browsers like Libre Wolf have restrictions, like not enabling WebRTC out of the box, meaning using Zoom, Meet etc is not possible. There are people who are forced to use such software and not able to tweak with config files. Some people think just because they can do it, everybody should be able to. I think it is a good choice to recommend to people, very good in place replacement for Chrome, you can even take your bookmarks and addons with you
the crypto and the asshole ceo aside, nobody should trust a browser that claims to respect privacy that’s based on chromium.
Brave search allows misinformation goggles for anyone that believes 2 + 2 = 5.
Am I misunderstanding something? That’s what I would expect to see from any search engine when you search for “vaccines” and “news from the right”.
Don’t forget about the fact that a while back they secretly whitelisted Facebook trackers in their adblocker to “make pages run more smoothly” they got a lot of shit for it when people found out looking through the source code. When I heard that they did that it basically cemented in my mind that they were shady and untrustworthy, that’s in addition to the Crypto and rewards stuff.
Fascinating… I knew some of this and it is indeed troubling.
It seems that Brave’s mission is actually about generating revenue by any method possible (including manipulation of end users) more than anything to do with privacy.
If you’re cool with all that then Brave is for you I guess.
privacytools.io uses affiliate links. privacyguides.org does not.
privacytools is not longer reputable. privacy guides started from it a few years ago for a reason.
Also don’t use Opera. They’re opera-ted by chinese mafia.
Chinese Mafia aside, opera GX sill benchmarks faster than any other browser, except maybe thorium
The crazy conspiracy guy I know uses Brave, so that already put me off.
deleted by creator
Wow, what scummy bastards. I used the browser for a little bit, and I kinda figured they were up to some shady shit when I noticed a crypto-wallet was included, but I ignored all that shit and it was fine. But if I’d known what the CEO or the company in general had been up to I’d have dropped that shit like a bad habit long before I did for other reasons.
Thank you for posting this! I had a vague recollection there was something scummy about Brave, and I was surprised to see it recommended in so many of the “Which browser should I use?” posts. It’s really handy to have a chronical of bullshit like this to point to when it comes up
Brave has great anti-fingerprinting measures I just wish I could get that without installing crypto malware on my pc
Oh boy, I shared the spacebar news article a year ago or so and was hit by a shitstorm of indignant comments.
