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.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I wouldn’t touch Brave with a ten-foot pole, but I heard that it’s configured for privacy by default, whereas Firefox requires extensions like uBlock Origin etc. So maybe Brave is better for idiots, I guess?

    • Katlah@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      1 year ago

      Brave is slightly better than default Firefox. But there are plenty of forks of Firefox that are way better than it out of the box.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Being lazy, I wish some of those forks were available in my distro’s apt repo.