this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Why I recommend against Brave. (thelibre.news)
submitted 1 week ago by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
315 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it's even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?

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[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 456 points 1 week ago (100 children)

tldr:

  • CEO was forcefully ousted from Firefox for anti-LGBTQ views and donations.
  • Replaced existing ads on sites with Brave's own "private" ads.
  • Collected crypto on behalf of others without their knowledge or consent
  • Injected referral links into crypto websites to steal crypto revenue
  • Put ads in the new page tab
  • Shipped a TOR feature that leaked DNS
  • Doesn't disclose the ID of their search engine crawler via useragent
  • Removed "strict" fingerprinting protection
  • CEO is generally a right-wing dick.
[–] b0o@lemm.ee 80 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks for the TLDR. Enough said, deleted Brave app. Firefox Focus is a good alternate.

[–] voodooattack@lemmy.world 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I hear Vivaldi is pretty good too

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 12 points 6 days ago

I used Vivaldi for a while. It's still Chromium, so I would recommend against it. There's too many good Firefox options to use anything Chromium.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 35 points 6 days ago

You should also add secretly whitelisted Facebook trackers in their adblocker, something they did a while back.

​

  • Shipped a TOR feature that leaked DNS

Yikes I didn't know they did that but I'm not surprised. There's a reason the people behind Tor say it should only be used via the official Tor browser, because only the Tor browser can provide that level of protection against those kind s of leaks, as well as much better fingerprinting resistance than chromium-based brave is going to give you.

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 7 points 6 days ago

Thanks for the summary.

[–] vala@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago

It's so "weird" how the same kind of person who would be openly anti-LGBTQ would also make a such a sketchy product.

[–] kingofras@lemmy.world 5 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Those are good reasons to ditch a product. Yet, at the same time, inside the Apple ecosystem this is the only browser that allows cross platform watching of yt without any ads, therefore suffocating Google and the fat cat MKBHD influencers from income.

So it’s like an evil to tame another evil to me atm.

Of course the best path forward would be to ditch both Brave and yt and then just get Nebula/patreon or something for serious content browsing.

I’m curious though: if I just use Brace only with a few yt tabs open and never open the new empty tab or visit another site, does Brave get any revenue from me?

[–] const_void@lemmy.ml 4 points 5 days ago

inside the Apple ecosystem this is the only browser that allows cross platform watching of yt without any ads

Not true. You can block ads with an extension in Safari.

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