The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

stackdiary.com /brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/

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Wasn't Brave always known to be shady in one way or the other? Which is why I never get why people say "remove Chrome get Brave" in 2023.
- A crypto company turns out to be shady? Who would have thought!
- Yes exactly. This is just yet another of Brave's long history of controversial moves.
  Typically, these have been followed by the CEO going on a marketing campaign. The new users drown out the controversy.
  
  "I don't know why, but it just FEELS wrong" is usually the hallmark of a marketing campaign against something. See: Hillary Clinton.
- ye first time i heard about brave was in a sponsor segment on a youtube video, my first thoughts were "lol another chromium browser? rewards? bar? ok this seems shady as hell" and sure enough it is indeed shady af. the Tor mode had DNS leaks way back (besides who in their right mind would even use tor in a chromium browser), URL injections, brave not giving out BAT, also them spam mailing Brave pamphlets to customers (physical mail too, it was through i think UPS, which idk if that's technically considered a privacy violation, but to me, mailing someone a pamphlet out of the blue when you use their browser without your consent is quite literally a privacy violation, no matter where you got the data from or how you mailed it).
  been gladly using firefox ever since version 3, best browser of all time.
- Honestly it shocks me that people are surprised by this.
  Any free product that also claims to be more privacy friendly is lying. In fact, if you want to farm the data of the group of people who are harder to track because they care about privacy... Launching a Chromium browser with a fancy skin and spending 80% of your money astroturfing online so "users" can "recommend" your "privacy friendly" browser everywhere is quite literally the best strategy.
  
  Linux is free, is thought to be more secure than alternatives when properly configured, and isn't a scam?
  I'm not saying Brave is good, just that it's not because something is free that it's bad
  
  Brave is very open about how it pays for itself via ads. Y'all conspiracy theory turds are starting to annoy me.
  
  They literally had to be called out for link jacking and tried to deny it for awhile. They’re anything be open. They are giant pieces of shit.
  
  So? Then Brave gets some extra money for something I was going to click on anyway. I don't see the issue.
  
  Can you really call it a conspiracy when they have a new privacy, user trust or otherwise shady issue every month?
  
  They really don't, not that I've seen anyway. Just stuff like this article that's 10% them doing something perfectly reasonable and 90% people going "they just feel shady!"
  If you can show me actually shady stuff they've done, I'm happy to change my mind.
  Usually when I ask this, it's something like "they do ads!" to which the obvious reply is "yeah they tell you that upfront".
  
  They quite literally inserted affiliate codes in the URL of products while you browsed.
  
  So? Then Brave gets some extra money for something I was going to click on anyway. I don't see the issue.
  
  Yeah, what's wrong with the browser selling itself as a privacy tool intercepting and modifying the links I browse?
  Honestly, I rest my case here.
  
  They're not compromising your privacy tho
  
  The issue is they weren't honest about it.
- I don't think they've been that shady, the worst thing they did was say "we're blocking ads" then said "You can show ads but only through us, and you need a braves token wallet" but else that, I don't think theres much, and when compared to the history of Microsoft and google, which are the major alternatives, that's such a small issue, especially when they also offer so many nice extras.
  I mostly use LibreWolf now, at least for my main browser, but I do miss the instant access to internet archive and tor, but I think its worth missing out on, to avoid some of the creep I'm feeling from Brave.
  Does anyone have a link to a list of controversy's that Brave has been involved in? I think it'd be good to know, rather than just going of both feeling, and 2 misdeeds.
  
  Edit: My comment below was originally based on a faulty understanding of how EDDM mailers worked and a faulty assumption I based on that ignorance. What they did in reality is little more than sending out spam mail, it was not a privacy violation. I've removed the mention of the EDDM mailers since they aren't relevant given this.
  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
  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.
  As others have pointed out, it's also Chromium based, and so it is just helping Google destroy the web more than they already have.
  
  Damn. I've been using Brace for a few years and have generally been happy with it. Guess I gotta find something else now.
  I know there's Firefox, I use it on occasion, but I have to get it working the way Brave does. Silly, I know, but I like things how I like things.
  
  Chrome for work. Vivaldi for personal stuff. Firefox for porn.
  The holy trinity.
  
  Their business model sounds 1000000% better than sucking up all your data and selling it to the highest bidder. Which is the alternative. Or people doing it for free/donations, which doesn't scale.
  
  But they serve ads. Do they say these ads are fully anonymized? The primary reason other vendors suck up all your data is precisely to serve ads. Why is Brave's serving ads different?
  I personally don't find inserting affiliate referral codes acceptable either, but yes at the end of the day this is the user's preference whether or not this is all acceptable to them.
- How exactly were they known to be shady?
- Yeah I find some of their monetisation stuff makes me a bit uncomfortable, such as their cypto stuff integrated into the browser and enabled by default. There was other articles that when browsing to certain site, the browser would inject their affiliate links (https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-affiliate-links-crypto-privacy-ceo-apology)
  In some respects I actually prefer Google’s approach to monetisation over Brave, although I don’t install that either. Having a browser billing itself as privacy focused while manipulating traffic to insert affiliate links leaves a bad taste and distrust of the company.
  I use Safari by default and Firefox as a fallback nowadays. Very rarely need to run a chromium browser.
  
  I recommend ungoogled chromium for when you need a chrome browser. There is 0 telemetry and it flies.

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