this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology
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Brave's marketing has always made me uneasy, but it was more like a vague thought. This why I'm intrigued by your opinion. Do you have examples of their "problematic" management?
It's of course biased, maybe for some people it wouldn't be problematic, but the CEO of brave has historically donated to organizations and California state bills that opposed same-sex marriage. This was around 15 years ago (2008 and 2009) so maybe he's changed. But for some people, that might be a dealbreaker. He resigned from Mozilla in 2014 because it came to light that he had made these donations. He apologized in 2014, but for some people that might not be enough.
(note: I'm not trying to be biased with this. For some people reading this, his apology might be perfectly fine for you. But, for others this might be enough to be labeled "problematic.")
Oooh I agree, this is some actual dirt
To focus more on the product there are 2 incidents I think of as to why I don't use brave
honorable mention is their affiliation with crypto
I read an article just yesterday about Brace selling AI access "rights" to other peoples' copyrighted work that gets pulled by their search, too. Like they have an equivalent of google snippets, but with much longer "snippets" of copyrighted books, and they explicitly sell "rights" for people to scrape that and other things for AI datasets, as if their search engine indexing a thing gives them ownership of it.
Also there was that one time they put a link to a neo-nazi website into their list of defaults on their homepage. Yup.
It's all to the point that I don't actually trust a word they say about their privacy protections either, really, even if I were willing to ignore everything else.
Yeah, the crypto stuff is getting too much, plus they're shoving stuff like their VPN, search, and news down users' throat. I used to use Brave as a secondary browser bc of its profile feature, but switched to Orion a couple weeks ago and never looked back.
The affiliate links are done by (almost?) every search engine so it’s not fair to single out Brave for it. Note I’m not defending them, if you’re truly up in arms about it talk about all of them doing it.
Do you have a source for that? I say this because it made the news everywhere when it was exposed. Just to be clear... it wasn't that affiliate links made the index. The Brave browser would hijack what you typed in the URL bar, even if it was the exact URL, with their own affiliate link
Looks like I need to start saving things as I stumble upon them because searching for them later is fruitless. I’ll delete my comment as I can’t dig up a source.
I honestly have never used Brave largely because its logo makes me feel like the developer is way too into WoW. Weird reason to judge a software probably, but sometimes it's best to trust your gut.