1y ago

Brave appears to install VPN Services without user consent

www.ghacks.net /2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-services-without-user-consent/

If you have the Brave Browser installed on your Windows devices, then you may also have Brave VPN services installed on the machine. Brave installs these services without user consent on Windows devices.

Brave Firewall + VPN is an extra service that Brave users may subscribe to for a monthly fee. Launched in mid-2022, it is a cooperation between Brave Software, maker of Brave Browser, and Guardian, the company that operates the VPN and the firewall solution. The firewall and VPN solution is available for $9.99 per month.

81 comments

Brave, owned by Brendan Eich who has donated to homophobic charities and whose browser promotes a load of crypto bro shit on the new tab page.
Unironically, using straight up Google Chrome is better IMO
- Bro missed his crypto scam chance by 6-12mo and just won't give up.
  I tell people to use open source Chromium, Firefox or ... Hell, use Vivaldi or something. Brave is a bad time waiting to happen at this point.

Would you looks at that brave doing something crazy again.
- Now we just gotta wait for the CEO to go on a marketing campaign for new users, in an attempt to drown out the story.

I've seen this software behaviour back in the day, oh wait its called trojan.

Yet another reason to not use Brave.

If you care about privacy at all why are you installing brave

Why is every fucking post in the privacy communities just a circle jerk about Brave?
- Marketing
- I know "not everyone who cares about security has anything to hide" but the fact they're so eager to use the pedophile browser is... concerning.

And spyware for free, and I would not be surprised if they included an insecure backdoor at no extra cost.
- As compared to a secure backdoor?
  
  Well, yeah, wouldn't want the users knowing about it.
  
  Both shitty, yes, but an unsecure backdoor is opening the door to every hacker on the planet, not just one group.

Well I feel better about making the switch to Firefox now, and doing a custom user.js

What is the consensus here on using Brave search in Firefox?
- It's giga cringe
- I've posted a similar question to asklemmy but more over the focus on preference than privacy. In short the search engine Kagi is really good, Brave search was what I had used for a while. I think search engine choice is a case by case kinda thing, each person uses what they like. There are some other engines I forgot from my post which are more privacy centered.
  
  Kagi is a literal scam
- I use Brave Search on Firefox, but I mostly use the shortcuts it provides like !yt and !g. A few months back I mostly used it over google, but the search results more times than not have been worse in comparison for me.

I use Vivaldi, Andisearch and Mojeek. I'm going fine with these. As VPN Proton

u/@MaxP said this at the !technology thread:
Software installs services to make its features operate, including optional default off ones. More news at 10.
This is just like any other optional feature of Chromium you don't use

That doesn't really seem that bad. There are issues with brave but that's not one of them
- A VPN provider has the same level of insight into your traffic as an ISP does when not using a VPN. If having one installed without your consent isn't a privacy issue I don't know what is...
  
  Is it activated by default though?

I don't use Windows but if you install a program that requires a service on Linux, the service will be written to your system's services daemon awaiting your activation. I don't see what the issue with that is.
- What's to stop the installer on Linux from configuring the service such that the service always runs on boot? e.g. systemctl enable malware.service.
  
  Linux doesn't have "installers" as Linux uses package managers. The only way you can get malware is if you manually add a bad repo.
  So it doesn't really matter in the long run
  
  You still need to manually enable the service. The configuration of the service has zero effect on its activation or lifecycle.

Check out thorium.rocks It is a fork of Chromium with performance and security improvement. Chris Titus recommends it.
- Even better, ditch chromium altogether. There are many performance and privacy focused Firefox forks.
  
  The developer of Thorium has a fork of Firefox called Mercury. Hmmm... Some obviously didn't check out the website.
- Thorium isn't good at all imo. They don't really do much to enhance privacy/security, and have constantly delayed updates. It seems to be ran entirely by 1 college kid in his free time.
  I like Chris Titus, but I wouldn't really use him as a source for privacy/security advice.

81 comments