If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it’s even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?
Disabling Brave Rewards on a new installation is not any harder than disabling Firefox’s Pocket crap, or Edge’s Copilot integration, or Chrome’s send-everything-to-Google behaviour.
I wish one day we can get a browser that serves the user instead of browser maker, but for now i’ll keep using Brave (it’s at least open source).
disabling … Chrome’s send-everything-to-Google behaviour.
Is that even possible?
There’s Ungoogled Chromium which claims to do just that
Yeah brave has it own issue, but overall it is still more privacy respecting than chrome or edge. Brave is personally not my choice. I use librewolf. Still, if someone ask me for a browser to use for their privacy journey I will undoubtedly tell them to just use brave. Firefox(and the forks) isn’t a choice for most normal people it often break Captcha. Some website even straight up just don’t allow Firefox based then tell you to use chrome. I am not by anyway try to defend Brave action, but I can’t see much choice that just work for people who don’t even know what an OS is.
I know that I am overly paranoid but they do the weird user ID thing. It it opt in as they said in their privacy policy.
When you install Vivaldi browser (“Vivaldi”), each installation profile is assigned a unique user ID that is stored on your device. Vivaldi will send a message using HTTPS directly to our servers located in Iceland every 24 hours containing this ID, version, cpu architecture, screen resolution and time since last message.
We anonymize the IP address of Vivaldi users by removing the last octet of the IP address from your Vivaldi client then we store the resolved approximate location after using a local geoip lookup
At least to my knowledge brave do not do anything like this or maybe it is opt out by default. But honesty, I think from now, I will recommend both of them and just let people choose.
There’s always Ungoogled Chromium. If you do want to suggest Brave to people, please tell them about these downsides as well.
Why I recommend against pushing people away from Brave:
Most people are still trapped in an ecosystem owned by either Microsoft, Google or Apple. We’re yet to see a perfect web browser for everyone, but in the meantime we choose one, maybe two or three if we feel a bit more picky for each task, and use them to the best of our capacity. Making anyone feel guilty and ashamed for choices like this, when the best options are few, relative, and often come at a cost, is just useless.
I suggest reading the settings guides available at privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ or checking the browser comparison at eylenburg.github.io/browser_comparison.htm to know the details that anyone who actually wants a better browsing experience cares about. Better to lend a hand than push around.
If whoever reads this still can’t get over it and needs to play a blame game with someone about why everyone should boycott Mozilla, Brave, Proton and other privacy focused FOSS companies because of what someone said, did or thought, please at least find a decent fork, toss a coin to it’s devs, share their work and help others benefit from it.
At this point there is a pretty solid list of reasons to avoid Brave and use another FOSS privacy focused option.
Personally, everything I’ve read about Brave makes me trust them even less than Microsoft, and Google.
That is the usual effect sensationalism has, but feel free to choose what best suits your needs.
I do enjoy Cromite, Librewolf, Mullvad Browser, Tor Browser and some others, but I can’t deny each (as any) has it’s own set of drawbacks. Better to have them in mind when setting up and using those browsers than to panic and run in circles searching for a perfect solution that doesn’t exist.
Even more importantly I’d celebrate that people are using any privacy focused FOSS, even if it’s not what I’d ideally use. If they feel motivated to keep on that road they’ll end learning to use more advanced options in time. On the other hand, make them feel insecure about their options and bloat their minds with sensationalist posts and they’ll just use Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge because, “personally”, why bother when everyone and everything is so evil and complicated and we’re all doomed anyway? 😮💨
Brave bought ad space on YouTube, and showed an ad on how to block ads on YouTube.
Mozilla could have done something similar with UBO but they just keep missing so many golden chances.
We need to get some moderators in here. Lots of bigotry in this comment section…
Literally bigots, Russian trolls are defending it like they are on Reddit. Isnt there a way to lock the comments from getting out of hand
