this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Privacy

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[–] [email protected] 197 points 9 months ago (43 children)

Your friendly reminder that the Brave CEO is Mozillas old CEO, who was fired from Mozilla for being unapologetically homophobic.

[–] VerseAndVermin 66 points 9 months ago

Since everyone else is piling on negatively, I appreciated your friendly reminder.

[–] Rose 25 points 9 months ago

Worse than merely being homophobic, as he financially supported politicians and causes that worked to prevent equal rights.

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[–] [email protected] 111 points 9 months ago (13 children)

The scam company brave? The one that scams people? With their scam based crypto rewards that don't pay out? THAT brave?

[–] [email protected] 103 points 9 months ago (5 children)

There's no reason to hate Brave unless you have a political bias against their CEO.

Besides in 2016, when Brave promised to remove banner ads from websites and replace them with their own, basically trying to extract money directly from websites without the consent of their owners

And when the CEO unilaterally added a fringe, pay-to-win Wikipedia clone into the default search engine list.

And in 2018, Tom Scott and other creators noticed Brave was soliciting donations in their names without their knowledge or consent.

And in 2020, when Brave got caught injecting URLs with affiliate codes when users tried browsing to various websites.

Also in 2020, when they silently started injecting ads into their home page backgrounds, pocketing the revenue. There was a lot of pushback: "the sponsored backgrounds give a bad first impression." Further requests were ignored (immediately closed)

And in 2022, when Brave floated the idea of further discouraging users from disabling sponsored messages.

And in 2023, when Brave got caught installing a paid VPN service on users' computers without their consent.

[–] drislands 36 points 9 months ago

But other than that, there's no reason!

[–] shotgun_crab 12 points 9 months ago

You're right, no reason at all :)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I had a small mountain of BAT they locked me out of due to shoddy linking with their banking affiliates and out of date DRM practices locking me out of my account due to too many devices being logged in (each OS update counted as its own device).

I noticed you didn't have that linked, that's because not every shitty move a company makes gets news coverage. Sorry I don't fit into your narrow view on what constitutes a valid reason.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If there's something interesting to add to the list, I'm curious. Brave did partner with a criminal organization currently under a $1.1 billion lawsuit, but I don't have enough information about your particular case.

Did the software lock you out or did their servers? Was this reported on anywhere?

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 9 months ago (4 children)

fuck brave all my homies hate brave

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[–] [email protected] 81 points 9 months ago (39 children)

Honestly you really should be using Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

The real answer

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[–] [email protected] 79 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Whenever people tell me to use Brave, I know they fall for marketing very easily

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Brave to end 'Strict' fingerprinting protection as it breaks owns ad revenue.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago

Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave's users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.

How are they getting this data? If it's with telemetry this data doesn't seem reliable, I doubt that people who change the fingerprint setting don't disable telemetry.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I used brave for a while, but left as I felt there was something fishy about them. Seems I was right

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] JoeKrogan 17 points 9 months ago

I'd rather have the sites break to be honest

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I'd ask why they don't make it optional (I'm not a Brave user) but it seems it was.

Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave's users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.

This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.

Given that, I'm inclined to agree with the decision to remove it. Pick your battles and live to fight another day.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Unless there’s a strong correlation between those who set fingerprint protection to strict and those that disable telemetry

In that case they’re about to piss off a much larger portion of their users than they realize

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

I don't like brave browser from first use. Something seemed off.

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