I didn’t know that. I heard Brave owned some crypto scam, but their browser was legit and open source. As long as you stayed away from crypto, you were okay.
Doesn’t their browser include uBlock by default? How do they make money with ads?
Brave promised to replace ads with privacy friendly ads that would actually pay publishers and even users with a volatile cryptocurrency while keeping a cut for themselves. This never actually came to life and was criticized as “blatantly illegal”.
Brave collected donations for popular content creators without actually involving or seeking consent from said creators. In short they accepted donations in crypto for creators, but would only pay out if it reached a minimum value of $100. When called out, Brave said refunds were impossible.
Brave refuses to disclose their crawler bot to websites since many websites want to block Brave Search. Brave will only chose not to crawl a website if it also blocks Google’s crawler.
Brave paid for targeted ads for users searching for Firefox in the Play Store and ran a campaign to “Forget the Fox”. When called out on this the VP publicly denied it and claimed it was photo-shopped.
The VP of Brave, Luke Mulks, frequently posts about all things crypto, from NFTs to FTX, and uses AI-gen images to promote them. He also frequently re-tweets right-wing activists.
Brendan Eich’s feed also frequently contains right-wing content and Republican propaganda despite his claims to be “independent”.
Basically, the business model of Brave is that they want to block ads on websites so that the browser itself serves the ads instead.
They aren’t blocking ads for the user’s sake, they’re blocking ads to kill their competition.
Brave isn’t popular enough to actually disrupt the online ad industry like that yet, so they’ve found other ways to make money (like crypto). But the built-in ad network was their original idea. It’s not exactly a pro-user organization.
I didn’t know that. I heard Brave owned some crypto scam, but their browser was legit and open source. As long as you stayed away from crypto, you were okay.
Doesn’t their browser include uBlock by default? How do they make money with ads?
Here’s a good summary of some of the shady practices that they’ve done by way of @cannedtuna@lemmy.world. It’s a summary of this article: https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
Brendan Eich’s anti-LGBTQ+ political involvement
2016 — Brave Browser promises to replace webpage ads
2018 — Brave runs a questionable donation campaign
2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
2020 — Brave puts ads in user’s home screens
2021 - Brave ships an insecure Tor feature
2023 - Brave hides their crawlers to websites
2024 - So-called “privacy browser” deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
And More!
They also got caught dynamically inserting their own referral codes into peoples’ URLs
Basically, the business model of Brave is that they want to block ads on websites so that the browser itself serves the ads instead.
They aren’t blocking ads for the user’s sake, they’re blocking ads to kill their competition.
Brave isn’t popular enough to actually disrupt the online ad industry like that yet, so they’ve found other ways to make money (like crypto). But the built-in ad network was their original idea. It’s not exactly a pro-user organization.
As far as i know, they have their own ad blocker and allow the user to allow some ads and share a part of the revenue with them