The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

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

137 comments

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.
- 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.
- 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.

Just lovely, when you think you found a browser that works decently and cares about privacy...
- Just use Firefox, it's always been the best out of them for Privacy
  
  Every time I try to use Firefox I run into the same incredibly annoying issue.
  Sometimes tabs will randomly not work. I'll open a new tab, go to, say, Google, and it will just hang, it never loads. Doesn't matter what site I try to load. It happens seemingly randomly. Sometimes it won't happen on the first page load, but the second.
  It's the entire reason I witched to brave, because I couldn't figure the problem out and every time I posted to reddit about it I would be told that nothing was wrong and it must be my add-ons, despite the fact it also happened when I un-installed all of them.
  It persisted to a new install, too. No idea what caused it and it's so annoying that I don't want to bother trying...
- Brave’s been super shady its entire existence. They’ve been caught linkjacking and accepting “donations” for websites that don’t have accounts (so theft via fraud).
  
  If you are talking about BAT, you should know that creators can sign up to get the BAT owed to them.
- Install Firefox (also works on mobile!), add uBlock Origin (also available on mobile!), done.
  
  *not on iOS **but soon will be due to EU laws (blink-based and gecko-based browsers will be available probably next year to comply with the law (yes worldwide, trying to region lock will result in 1) it won’t work anyway and 2) assdestroying fines from the EU for blatant violation)
  
  And if you are feeling extra frisky, install noscript to pick and choose what sources of js you are willing to run and/or be terrified/furious of all the non-relevant scripts sites run.
  
  Deleted
- The browser is fine. Nobody seems to have read the article. It’s about their search engine. It doesn’t have anything to do with privacy, instead it’s about copyright infringement.
  I’m not sure why this was even posted here. Maybe OP didn’t read the article either.
- I was suspicious as soon as I saw it runs on Chromium. I can safely assure you, Google is not focusing on privacy features there.
  
  Chromium and Chrome are not the same thing.
- yeah, it is such a pain 😥. but hardened firefox 😏
- Nope it’s always been bullshit, like Blue Buffalo.
- Vivaldi is awesome. Both for desktop and android.
  
  Why do people just don't use something like Firefox or any forks of it. Its the only browser which is truly still Open Source

The more surprising part of this article is that enough people use Brave to create enough of a dataset to train AI.
I have a feeling that in a future AI society, one trained on Brave data would be considered special needs.
- This is data scraped from websites for the brave search engine, not data from browser users
  
  Thanks for the clarification - this is actually a lot worse when reading through the article. I hadn't realized they even had a search crawler.

The browser with fuckloads of baked-in crypto was doing shady shit? No way!
No idea why no one made a fork that just follows the original basically but removes all the “BAT” crypto, web3, all that dogshit, bullshit, annoying-ass crypto bro shit.
- Someone tried to do it a few years back and either got threatened with a lawsuit or actually got sued by Brave because of it. The browser was called Braver; you can look it up!
  
  Is Brave not open source?
  I mean I get why a normie would back down even from a bullshit suit from a company (laws favor capital and they can drag it forever to fuck you… Nintendo loves doing this too with the Switch modding community (most recently))
  Assholes either way. Developing using open source code and then crying foul when someone removes you bullshit.
- They do, it’s called Chromium
  
  Chromium isn’t available on some OS (most notably iOS for now because Apple sucks shit)
  Also last I checked, which was recently, Chromium doesn’t come with adblock built-in. In fact doesn’t basic vanilla chromium not allow addons at all?
  So a Brave fork would be all the good parts of it (the ad blocking chiefly) but minus the bad parts like the crypto BS. Maybe that’s an entirely different project, I don’t know. I just use Firefox+ubo on desktop. Doesn’t matter that much to me if someone does it or not, but I was always confused why privacy-centric people seemed to love the crypto browser.

I just switch back to good old firefox.

ITT: Cryptobros and apologists finding new and creative ways to justify the behaviour of a company, the head of which was ousted from his last position because of crude political views, i.e. not granting people basic rights.

How is this related to privacy? The whole thing is about copyright infringement…
- The Brave browser is billed as an ad-blocking, privacy protecting, champion of the everyday internet user.
  We know they’re not, but they openly masquerade as one and so when they do something shady it’s somewhat relevant to put them on blast yet again. Just look at all the people in this thread alone that are like “oh wtf Brave isn’t good for privacy?”
  I mean I’m sorry you’re not learning anything new from this content but we should probably be happy others are.

This article is about brave search not the browser.
- Brave Search and Brave Browser are both products of the same company, Brave Software, Inc.

I got a bad feeling about that app when i tried it. Something about it didn't "feel" right. Went crawling right back to firefox after.

I am not an expert and I am sincerely asking, but everyone who is recommending Firefox, how do you feel about DuckDuckGo?
- DDG is miles ahead of Brave. But the company behind it has a deal with MS to feed them user data. They're transparent about it and the motivation isn't nefarious. But still, it's a thing. Now obviously, FF has deal with google, so I guess it's more of a "pick your poison" situation
- Love it except I can't use it because I don't save cookies to keep the "dark setting" enabled and dark reader doesn't automatically invert it, likely due to them breaking some sort of common html/css standards if I had to guess. Wish they would fix it for accessibility. :(
  
  Here ya go, just bookmark this: https://duckduckgo.com/?kae=d
  You can change tons of settings via url parameters
  https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/settings/params/

This is important information but it really should be compared to google chrome, safari, edge, and Firefox default settings, which are all bad for privacy, and when combined, make up 99% of browsers.
This article is written like everyone already knows how to install and use librewolf.

As someone who swapped to chrome > chromium > ungoogled-chromium > brave > firefox > librefox and then back to brave....? Idk, it feels like theres no such thing as a "perfect browser" and that all browsers has a some sort of "anti-consumerism" built-in that we are (still) not aware about.
- What is anti-consumer about firefox?
  
  Apparently it has some built-in telemetry and forces political propaganda towards users.
- That's why I use Opera /s
- I switched from Brave to Vivaldi.
  I was having issues with a web app after a Brave update, so I went to check the changelog to see what might have caused it. It was 100% crypto/nft shit in the change log.
  That's not what I need/want from a web browser.

Probably all browsers spy in some way.
- I'm pretty sure that Lynx does not
  
  do you want lynx spy on you? [Yes/No/Always/neVer]
- That’s not what this article is about.

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