Brave is not an ethical browser
PenPen's Note: Originally written by the one and only on Sep 10 2021, crossposted from https://rentry.co/notbrave. Now adapted further as he lost the edit code, however sunset because it is not well written.
Brave browser is not ethical.
Referrals
Brave began injecting referral links into pages you visit without notifying anyone: So, after the obvious backlash because this is so shady, Brian, the brave CTO, came out and said “You can disable this in a flag”. Flags are like hidden settings. There are hundreds of them, and all with technical names so most consumers will never touch them or know they exist.
Crappy Founder Intentions
The Founder: You likely have not heard of Brendan Eich. He is the founder of brave browser, but he did more before that. Brendan made political donations to anti gay marriage organizations. He got promoted to CEO of Mozilla, but quickly was essentially forced to resign due to Mozilla employees being actually ethical and saying “We don’t want this looser”. He lasted 11 days.
We found out Eich had donated $1,000 in support of California’s Proposition 8, the ballot measure to roll back same-sex marriage rights. He also donated $2,100 to Tom McClintock, a politician and supporter of Prop 8.
When his donations came to light, he apologized for “causing pain.” He did not apologize for his views. In fact, he was quite specific not to apologize or claim he had reformed his homophobic views
You can guess what came next, the dude says “Screw firefox, I want my own browser” - so now he leads a company and can choose to hire whoever he wants. This is not the end.
Anti-Mask
Eich has also been vocal in denying face masks and lockdowns effectiveness, stating that"Fauci lies a lot". By using brave you are supporting him.
Ties to infogalactic
infogalactic is essentially the Wikipedia clone for alt right racists who got tired of vandalizing Wikipedia with their lies. No more to add here - why the fucking hell is this a default search engine. https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/5475
Fraud
This one is absurd. Essentially, brave offers a tipping feature. You can use the BAT you earned to tip content creators for their hard work! Awesome right! WRONG. Brave, for whatever reason, decided to add random youtubers who did not sign up - Allowing people to tip to fake shell creators. There is no opt out.
“it’s about ‘passing off’, claiming you represent someone when you don’t.”
PenPen's Note: Someone is surely going to send Evan an angry email about faked screenshots
- Tom’s current views: https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1279112966974177287
- The original, deleted tweet: https://twitter.com/tomscott/status/1076160882873380870
In the brave terms, they say they can use donations for fun if they wish - provided it is not redeemed. People think they are doing good, but they are being lied to.
PenPen's Note: This section does not reflect Evan’s current views of coil. Please see Interledger for more up to date comments.
So yeah, don’t use brave. If you want to support creators, try coil. It’s a 5$ subscription to support the websites you use without ads or anything. You can finally feel good about yourself using a adblocker - Unlike brave’s “We remove ads than inject our own but we only pay sites that signed up”