I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL's. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I'd say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don't mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
What if I told you… this isn't a Google product?
Chromium is a Google product and it heavily depends on it.
I would argue it is a Google project, not a Google product. I would say the same of webp and Android. The original project may be made by Google, however every implementation is vendor-specific and may not have any calls back to Google. So, saying "you are assured zero privacy" is not helpful when the lack of privacy can be prevented by the vendor.
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When someone builds a skyscraper and then you take one small unit in it and paint the walls a color you like and change the light fixtures, would you say that you built the skyscraper?
Because that's what Brave (and everyone else who builds on top of Chrome codebase) does.
When the builders then decide to remake the wiring in the whole building so it doesn't work with your new light fixtures you bend over and take it because you don't have a choice - you have nowhere near close enough resources to remake the whole wiring for yourself.
That's Google's power over the forks.
Yes… But they can modify it like they did when they suppressed Manifest V3 and like they will for the new web drm.
maintaining a custom fork of a very active software project is very hard bcz google maintains chromium and they don't have to ask anyone if they want to add or remove something from their project but if you are a maintainer of a fork who adds more features and don't upstream your changes(in brave case google will not accept pull request from them for the feature they already remove like Manifest V3) maintaining the patches and constantly porting them to the newer version is a pain in the ass and imagine yourself working against large team of google engineers, they get paid to do this but not lots of people have resources to keep fixing all the PRs from Google devs which they make to break the adblockers to maximize Google profits.
its far better to use a browser which was made from ground up to support user privacy and features rather then patching a browser which was made to compromises their user privacy
Unfortunately we don't have that yet, since Librewolf is a fork of Firefox as well.
Also, if I had to guess by the number of forks, Gecko is way harder to fork than Chromium.
If I use a USB device, does that mean I'm using an IBM/Microsoft product? No, it's an open source standard. Same applies to Brave, Chromium is a standard open source starting point to build browsers on- the only tie to Google is the developer of the original backbone for the program.
Imagine using stuff from a company whose main income (~90%) is from a deal with Google… Oh, wait…
I see Mozilla did that in 2017, wonder if they still have the same contract. TBF Google funding them would be super smart, they can give them enough cash to stay solvent, but not so much they can take over, giving them fantastic protection from being beat up as a monopoly.
In the end, Mozilla is being fueled with money coming from violating the privacy of internet users.
You're right, but you can't reason with them.
They just repost the same dozen articles from the same places about the times that brave did stupid shit to make money three-four years ago.
Ohh the start page is scummy! yeah i changed it Ohh they have crypto, yeah i don't use it Ohh there's an icon for it on the task bar, yeah i turned that off. Ohh they'll sell your data. My data's been sold by worse.
Ohh google will sell your data. That was already the worse.
I'll get downvoted into the ground, but right now, Brave with shields up + privacy badger is the only browser I can run with javascript enabled that does a half decent job at anonymizing my fingerprint, verifiable by https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
"your browser has a randomized fingerprint" I don't see that anywhere else that's more reputable.
I'm less worried about them selling my crap than Amazon and Google tracking me through my fingerprint.
As long as they manage to disable the ad bullshit google is shoving in the browser, I'll keep using them. I also have a copy of firefox kept in sync with brave in case I never need to walk away.
I was curious and got that same fingerprint result on Firefox for android set to strict with privacy possum, ublock origin and ghostery addons.
I'll give it a shot in windows. one sec…
No good.
I suspect it's because you're on Mobile. Not a lot of unique plugin combos and screen layouts.
Brave + Privacy badger outright lies on the browser interrogation.
I also just tested on windows with Strict privacy set and the 3 addons mentioned and I got my browser has "strong protection against web tracking" and unique fingerprint output.
Not trying to say you're wrong or anything just playing devils advocate and sharing what I'm seeing.
Unique fingerprint is bad.
Let's say you signed up on my econmerse website. Let's say you gave me your name phone number, address, what have you. I can collect information about your user agent screen resolutions and layout and list of plugins and generate a unique fingerprint tied to that data.
I can then sell that fingerprint along with your phone number and email address to anyone that is interested.
Something like Lexus Nexus goes and buys that fingerprint from me, and they can now correlate your "anonymous" browser session with name address and phone number.
DuckDuckGo does this out of the box.
Safari + Privacy Badger too (I use Safari as my work related browser).
But if Brave works for you then that's cool.
Can't do safari, but I'll check out ddg
edit: Did DDG install in windows, It still has a unique fingerprint, failed that part of the coveryourtracks test for fingerprinting
I figured I'd just install one of the privacy extensions. It does not support extensions. No privacy addons, no external password managers.
Of a lesser worry, they're still openly selling off tracker data to microsoft (data as of 2022) but to be fair brave might be selling my data to them in different ways.
I'll keep my eyes out, but it looks like for now, DDG is a no go.
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Then it's a good thing they're not just using handing out chromium binaries.
They forked it. do their own things to it, pull out whatever telemetry they want, add in whatever features they want.
It's not like they have to take the upstream with impunity.