Please, do not use Brave.
Please, do not use Brave.
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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its open source tho, show me the spyware and i will belive you
It's not just about spyware. It's about the actions of the company and the fact it's Chromium based.
idk who the guy who made brave is and what he does but the browser works and definately isnt spyware coz you can just go look at the code yourself
Fwiw the guy who made Brave is the same guy who who wrote JavaScript. He created Firefox too iirc, but was booted by Mozilla for being loudly and publicly homophobic.
I haven't heard anything about him being a pedophile, however.
(It's probably worth mentioning: he wrote JavaScript over the course of 10 days in 1995, iirc. Over literally the next 28 years, JS has been developed and maintained by everyone but Eich - so if you're weirded out by the fact that Eich wrote JS, he really did very little of it. If all we had was his version of it, it would be nowhere near as prevalent as it is today. JavaScript is still garbage, but at least it's our garbage.)
When was the last time you audited the Brave code?
If that was a prerequisite to use or trust open source software than most FOSS stuff would be worthless. It is not however. Many people like to use Linux but probably have not read the whole source code. Doesn't matter, there's plenty people that do and being open by nature is just more transparent. If they do something shady someone will most likely see it. With closed source software that is not the case.
i bet half these people saying not to use brave use windows smh
I don't disagree with you generally, but any open source software can contain malware if no one is actually looking at the source code.
To be fair, the binary that gets installed might be altered. I believe Microsoft does this with vscode, they were open about it.