I ask because I feel the same but don't actually have any proof that things are shady. It is just a feeling which obviously isn't enough to convince others but is enough to put me off using it the few times I've tried.
Something about all this 'rewards' stuff just feels dodgy. No idea why I feel this, I probably read something at some point but don't recall now.
I never understood why people think affiliate are bad.
I get that it's unethical do it without users consent,
but I am personally OK with anyone using affiliate links for whatever I subscribe to. I don't lose anything, I don't pay for it, some company is letting other people or smaller companies increase budget. I often ask my colleagues if they can get me referral link before I signup for something. What's wrong with it?
They create the wrong incentives. In a niche I operate in, there are a ton of otherwise reputable websites promoting inferior products merely because they make more money promoting those products rather than products whose owners don't have an affiliate system.
A widget hand-made by an owner-operator in small-town USA who sells from his own website gets ignored while the Amazon-listed widget made in a Chinese sweatshop gets shilled because Amazon pays affiliates.
There's nothing wrong with it, but it's a shady practice to do it automatically (no disclosure) on a Browser that claims to be a more privacy focused browser.
From a technical perspective, many affiliate links are redirect based. So the end user may only see the initial site they clicked from and the final site they go to, but there is a redirect in the middle.
This can be used to track users across the web without their knowledge or consent.
However I don't know Brave's implementation here. Just answering the question in the abstract.
So you are ok with people modifying input you put into an app you installed? What if they modified the query paramter automatically to send info from your computer/iphone? Why are you covering so much for Brave in this thread?
Of course you pay for it, it's the same thing as free shipping: the seller increases its prices to take into account how much they're going to pay to affiliates.
Well, a lot of reporting on the affiliate code situation partly mischaracterized what actually happened. There was an auto-complete suggestion that was auto-selecting when you pressed "enter", and it was fixed shortly thereafter. There is a blog post about it called "On Partner Referral Codes in Brave Suggested Sites".
That said, it does essentially the same thing Firefox does when you do a search on Firefox. Try right now: go into Firefox, type in a search in the URL bar, press enter, and you'll see it appends/"injects" a Firefox "affiliate code" as a query parameter so that Firefox gets a cut from Google. One salient difference is that Firefox's "affiliate code" is a vanity code (human readable: "?client=firefox-b-d"), so it isn't viscerally shocking.
If it read "?client=brave" like it does on Firefox, it's very likely no one would have ever cared!
I've used it for over a year and yeah it's nothing more than a feeling -- experience has just been better than anything else in terms of the default ad blocking. "Disable your ad-blocker" things also leave you alone because they know if you are using Brave you aren't going to budge.
That's not how anti-adblocker banners work, generally. Brave is likely just using the anti-anti-adblocker lists, which uBlock and many others now use, as well.
Brave by default collects telemetry data. It is anonymized but any security researcher will tell you that metadata of this nature over time can be more revealing that is claimed. It's right their in their FAQ.
Brave's primary customers are advertisers. While this is not evidence in itself, it is certainly something to be wary of.
This appears to be the only FAQ that mentions anonymized data:
> Will Brave sell user data to advertisers?
>
> We do not have access to identifiable user data. The anonymized aggregated ad campaign related data we do collect is used for accounting and reporting, but this data cannot be mapped back to devices or user identities of any kind. Learn more
If you follow the "Learn more" link it says:
> If you switch on Brave Rewards and switch on ads (in Rewards settings) you will see ad notifications, and will receive BAT to reward you for viewing these ads.
>Brave by default collects telemetry data. It is anonymized but any security researcher will tell you that metadata of this nature over time can be more revealing that is claimed.
TL;DR It's an ad company posing as a privacy company. Brave replaces other ads with Brave's, created a crypto currency for the purpose of sharing profits with website owners, but in reality pockets almost all of the money since site owners rarely become aware of it [0] or more likely because it's spread so thin across the web that few sites reach the 100$ threshold.
Even without the crypto stuff, when I installed it, it felt like an intern first eclipse plugin. Few buttons more, a different help page and that's it. Didn't inspire technical strength and quality.
That's weird, it's pretty indistinguishable from the other browsers for me. Reminds me of a cross between Opera and Firefox.
It's run by one of the principle Firefox devs (Eich) and none of the stories about it ripping people off or being insecure appear to have been well founded.
I've used all the major browsers, starting with Mosaic and Netscape, was there when FF was phoenix, have been writing websites for 20 years (only a small amount of that time commercially). YMMV but it seems trustworthy, privacy focused, fast enough (ie I can't tell if it's different in performance terms).
It's just reskinned Chrome with privacy extensions built in and a system to enable people to try and send micropayments to sites if the sites are signed up.
It's not reminiscent of Eclipse in anyway for me (mind Eclipse to me most evokes poor DE integration, I'm a long time KDE user, and having a billion settings).
Yeah I wonder if most of the Brave allegations (that are usually attached to no actual verifiable facts) are in fact hit pieces on Eich from the bully crowd
Yes it felt like a reskinned Chrome with a few unfinished parts bolted on. And coming from Eich big new project I thought it would be way more polished.
Replacing ads on sites you visit with their ads, wrapped up in a cryptocurrency scheme, like you'd expect from a literal virus, brought to you by a guy too homophobic to be on Mozilla's board.
Plus, and I have no evidence of this apart the synchronized hype they do for the browser, but I'm pretty sure Brave is secretly bankrolling those very... political... Linux YouTubers.
I do enjoy the irony that Mozilla seems to have gone downhill ever since he left / got kicked out. The people replacing him, IIRC, aren't as knowledgeable or expert as he was. But then, I am somewhat a fan of pure meritocracy.
Of course (to reply to downvoted up-comment), we don't and never did "[replace] ads on sites you visit". But when it comes to evil-me, making false claims is justified? Seems so!
The important thing is that we punish companies that are actively trying to fix the problems we all care about because they didn’t fix them perfectly the first time or in exactly the way we would prefer.
Sometimes the users on this site sound like they are drowning, but when you throw them a like jacket, they push it away as they complain about the colour.
No, we punish them when they have fraudulent practices and when the product is a scam, like brave is. They modify user's input without their consent, they accept money with no guarantee of delivering to the intended target and talk about privacy as a selling point when they run an ad network . I cannot believe how much people turn in to a cult like fanboy for a product they understand very little about.
We fixed the bug where refcodes were added to binance.us and binance.com URLs. That was a blunder, but not a scam. We made no money from it.
As for "modify user's input without their consent", go type keywords into any browser, Firefox Safari Chrome Edge etc. You'll see search affiliate client code, same as we had by mistake for the two binance domains, and only as suggestions for other partners (all of this, we removed in the springtime, to quell concerns and misrepresentations such as you make here).
We do not "accept money" as intermediary, the browser holds the tips to unverified creators. You seem to be operating on misinformation here. In December 2018 we briefly shipped a system that sent our own funds when directed, back to us, on behalf of unverified creators. That too was a mistake, but we fix bugs and so such tips are now buffered client-side. In any case, we were the source of funds there, not the user.
We've taken great pains with Brave Ads (not an "ad network" by the way) to avoid any privacy problems, starting by making them opt-in, using in-browser-only data matched against a fixed-per-population-per-day catalog, confirmed via Privacy Pass (blind signature cryptographi). This is the wave of the future, even Google is trying to do a Privacy Sandbox now, but they are piling up risks and letting partners into the sandbox last I looked.
It's clear you have some underlying problem with us, but it isn't based on the facts. What's the story?
Great - tell me how to make mouse gestures work on ALL pages - that include new tab page/speed dial and firefox internal and I am sold. Unfortunately I don't think that anything short of messing with the code and rebuilding makes it possible.
Yup, I use touchpad a lot and lack of proper gesture support on precision touchpads on Windows makes it unusable to me. To this day all bugs regarding this are open and only chromium based browsers support it nicely.
"Mining" in the context of crypto has a very specific definition, and Brave doesn't even come close. Mining involves using your computing resources to complete calculations that ensure the security of the blockchain, resulting in a cryptocurrency payout.
A company taking money on your behalf without notification, while slimy, isn't mining.
