At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see. Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave, and thatās whatās wrong in general with the ābut the UX is so niceā mentality.
Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave
It starts to feel astroturfed at a certain point. The last week or so has been crazy.
At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see.
To be clear, that means Brave is ā invading their usersā privacy, and ā” stealing money from web publishers.
The point of referral codes is to reward web publishers for referring users to a product; leading to the user buying a product that they otherwise wouldnāt.
Your browser isnāt introducing you to a product. For it to insert referral codes for the browser vendorās benefit is stealing money.
If you really dig into the whole ordeal it was a software error, not some malicious idea to steal links from creators.
How exactly does one accidentally insert affiliate data on links? At some point someone wrote that code, which is malicious in itself, even if the activation was accidental.
Itās also strange that it happened twice, first with amazon links, then they started injecting affiliate data for crypto platforms instead.
Most of the stuff that happens on the backend of any software goes on āwithout your consentā.
You clicked on a webpage.
You were brought to that webpage.
You werenāt tracked, logged, or had your data exploited or anything. All that happened was Brave got an affiliate bonus.
Now if the companies in question were angry at Brave for doing that, I could understand. But why should we, the users, give a shit?
