this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Please, do not use Brave. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] amju_wolf@pawb.social 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ehh there is only so much a single person can care about. If you have a life and aren't effectively an activist/lobbyis by profession you can't care about politics both local and global, preserving nature and ecolody, world hunger & disease, and a million other things like which software company is less evil all at once and follow through 100%, supporting all of the causes meaningfully.

Not to mention we have to make compromises, too.

There’s one and literally only one browser that actually stands for all the things the most vocal people around here claim to care about.

Hard disagree. Firefox had its fair share of controversies, it's still technically funded by Google (while not accepting donations), and Mozilla Foundation as a nonprofit is pretty questionable too.

The leadership of Mozilla Corporation is shit too like any other corp; they lay off engineers and give themselves huge bonuses.

It takes them years to even acknowledge simple bugs, let alone actually getting to fix them.

A huge part of why Firefox lost the "browser wars" is also that they failed to make it easy to build into other apps so it could work more like Electron, while also pissing off users with surface changes that break their workflow.

Overall it's better than Chrome especially if you care about privacy, but it's not a huge win.