I only use brave at work because it somehow bypasses the firewall there and I can install and use it. I run it to watch videos about cooking or traveling and reading news when I have nothing to do at my job.
At home I usually run tor browser (tbb) and firefox with addons to block ads and tracking.
I’m not sure I should turn to brave as default browser. How do you see it?
what’s your experience with brave like?
Functionally, read this guide here: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers
Philosophically, Brave does a lot of shady user tracking and crypto shit of their own, and I choose not to use it for that reason. Better than Chrome. Worse than Firefox. In my opinion.
The one founded by the guy who got fired from Mozilla for supporting hate groups?
The one that integrates support for NFTs, the stupidest form of cryptocurrency scam?
That browser?
Apparently they sell user data to train AI models… search for “brave controversy”
Apparently you need to follow your own advice and do a search because it takes 30 seconds to see they are collecting data from their search engine not the browser. So if you don’t use their search (which is pretty shit anyway) it’s not relevant to the browser side of things. The browser is completely open source and everyone can see what the code is doing.
And isn’t using search data to improve search results a pretty reasonable usecase for AI? Seems like a nothing burger. For the record I use librewolf but I find the constant Brave hate to be undeserved.
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-What-is-the-Web-Discovery-Project-
If you opt in, you’ll contribute some anonymous data about searches and web page visits made within the Brave Browser (including pages arrived at via some, but not all, other search engines). This data helps build the Brave Search independent index, and ensure we show results relevant to your search queries. By “data” we mean search queries, search result clicks, the URLs of pages visited in the browser, time spent on those pages, and some metadata about the pages themselves.
My emphasis.
So just don’t opt in then? They’re not selling the data, it’s completely optional, and they explain exactly what they’re collecting, how they’re collecting it, and what they’re using it for. This is all completely reasonable. They have to get this information for to improve the search somehow. Even the actual collection component is open source. I’m not sure what the issue is.
Used it for a while years ago, hated all the crypto stuff it tried to push but could still ignore most of it. Then saw the CEO sharing antivax propaganda and decided to try different options, ended up finding much browser options out there. These days I’m running Vivaldi. I think I would only put brave ahead of chrome itself now.
It’s shady AF. Anything with that much crypto bs baked in shouldn’t be trusted.
