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hhj @kbin.social

1y ago

Brave appears to be selling copyrighted data for AI training and giving third parties the “rights” to that data, while not disclosing its own robot crawler

www.techmeme.com Brave appears to be selling copyrighted data for AI training and giving third parties the “rights” to that data, while not disclosing its own robot crawler

By Alex Ivanovs / Stack Diary. View the full context on Techmeme.

Brave appears to be selling copyrighted data for AI training and giving third parties the “rights” to that data, while not disclosing its own robot crawler

37 comments

Every few months there's something new coming up about that browser. Here's a non-exhaustive list of shady stuff:
Manipulating search results to show ads
Releasing Pay-to-surf with extensive tracking
Blocking ads from companies only when they haven't paid them not to
Gathering data about other installed browsers
Crypto scam (yes, it was a scam, they stopped doing payouts)
Profiling user habits and selling that data to advertisers
Buying reviews
Of course, there's more.
- As far as I know. Firefox still doesn't do any of those things, either.
  
  Firefox has built-in ads (that you can disable) on the home page.
  Not as hot garbage as Brave cryptoscamming and replacing ads with their own and hijacking affiliate links, but it might be of interest if you want to try Firefox.
- I haven’t used Brave for many years because I knew about all their shady shit years ago. Everyone knew if they bothered to just read about it.
- Yeah Brave is hot garbage

Brave doing shady stuff? Who could have imagined?? /s
- @LollerCorleone
  @hhj The more you find out about them, the worse they get.

Who'da thunk a browser made around crypto shit would do such a thing. I only use this browser on my phone because of the ad blocking to open links people send me, I should just get something else. Does mobile Firefox get proper ad blocking?
- Yes Firefox supports adblocking and you should switch to this.
- Yes you can add extensions to Firefox mobile, I recommend Ublock Origin
  
  Switched to Firefox a year ago for exactly this reason. Chrome and Edge for work related stuff and Firefox for any personal things.
- Check out https://nextdns.io/ it’s a privacy focused dns resolver but it also lets you include blocklists at the dns level which are the same lists used by stuff like ublock origin. That’ll block adds and trackers at the dns level before they even hit your device. I’ve had it on my android and iOS devices for years. It will even block most stuff in apps as well.
- if you’re using android, mull is supposed to be the good privacy fork of firefox
  i think it has ad-blocking but i do ad blocking through my router anyway, so idk for sure

Me beating the "Just use Firefox" drum for all eternity
- there are a small amount of websites that don’t work properly on firefox… when my phone was being repaired i couldn’t pay my rent on anything that wasn’t chrome
  
  That does suck, and I've encountered a rare couple of websites that only work on Chrome myself as well, but that's exactly why we need to use Firefox. They shouldn't be able to get away with that. Google shouldn't hold such a monopoly on the Internet, and using rebrandings of Chromium only helps Google dominate the web.
- Mozilla has also been shoehorning AI into places it doesn't belong, namely the Mozilla Developer Network documentation. Seems like no place is safe…
  
  I'm not sure I agree. I literally can't think of a better usage of AI than aiding development, particularly parsing documentation. If one thinks AI doesn't belong there, then I have to assume you are just against it conceptually.
  
  there are firefox forks that might be safer? tor (overkill?), mullvad browser, and librewolf
  if you use macos, there’s also orion

They're shady? I'm shocked.

I keep getting recomended Brave and I just don't understand it. These sort of things keep happening with them.
- reddit bros recommend brave, chad fedi users recommend firefox (and its forks)
  
  Whats the recomended Chromium based browser? Firefox is my primary browser but i have a few use cases that only work in Chromium.

Shocking! Or not!

Shady browser continues to do shady stuff, news at 11. /s

Oh no! Anyways...

37 comments