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The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training
(stackdiary.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.
I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.
(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)
I got downvoted to shit on Reddit for saying stuff like this (on the weirdly frequent posts about how great Brave is)
Ig I’ve found my people now
Firefox has been super good for me as well. I switched from Chrome a few years ago and initially had the occasional issue, but thinking about it now I can't recall the last time I had an issue with Firefox that forced me to use another browser.
Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?
If not: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
lmao still thinking moz corporation is your friend
How so? I don't think I've ever heard anything negative against the company, but I'd love to know if I missed something.
The latest controversy was about Mozilla working with Meta in a project about privacy in ads.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/privacy-preserving-attribution-for-advertising/
Don't really know if this is a good or bad thing
You’re going to need to cite some sources for these fairly wild claims.
This is the most egregious lie of the bunch. Firefox is extremely close in terms of features, performance, usability, HTML/JS/CSS support, developer tools, etc. It’s privacy tools are, if anything, significantly better. And once Manifest v2 extensions stop being supported by Chrome (which is coming next year) it’ll have significantly better adblocker support.
HUGE lie. Firefox is so freaking slow compared to basically anything else.
Firefox. The slowest browser, the least compatible browser, the most annoying when it comes to bugs and issues (Firefox snap anyone?)
I just cannot disagree more. You seriously have to gaslight yourself into liking it.
What a strange take. I switched from Opera to Firefox like 15+ years ago (whenever Firefox added extensions, so I could use Mouse Gestures (why I was on Opera in the first place))
I never have issues with compatibility or speed. I don’t use Google products so I don’t have Chrome to compare it to, but it’s certainly as fast as/faster an IE/Edge.
Firefox has been my browser for eons, but I admit I think Edge is faster. It doesn't matter to me in the end though.
Edge feels like the same speed to me, but our household has monster computers!
Edge is Chrome.
*Chromium, which is not the same. But I get your point.
Yes, there is a difference, but it's minor and big stuff, like adblocking not working as well, are true of Chrome and Chromium.
Wow, that is quite a presumption there. Every couple years I try Chrome again and I am done with it in a few hours. The thing is archaic and its interface uncustomizable. And the only reason it could maybe have more compatibility is because of its market share and peoples' bias towards it. There was once a time over ten years ago when it was good, but it's not anymore. Not to mention the privacy issues.
Firefox has been my browser for 10 years or longer.
To each their own.
Every couple of years I try firefox, and it doesn't take me long to be disappointed. Usually just some random incoherent firefox incompatibility with a major feature like logging in on a site or something.
wait, what? I was just looking for a search engine that does least tracking and brave was recommended a few times, so I use that, but have never seen any ads or been offered any payout? Am I doing it wrong? (for the record, if they'd offered me payment to watch ads I would have never even installed it in the first place, and will now be removing it as my default on firefox)
no, you are right. there is a lot of talk about the brave browser in this thread, a chromium based ad blocking browser by the brave company that gives you their own crypto in return for unobtrusive ads on the start page, which can then be used to donate to content creators on the internet (i think) or be cashed in. you and the op are talking about brave search, a search engine created by the same company
ah, that would explain it, thanks!
I've been using brave browser for years and, while I vaguely know what you're talking about, it's not something I've ever even looked at.
The defining feature of Brave for me has always been the built-in ad blocking.
I used it for the perceived level of privacy they pretended to offer. Guess I'm switching to Firefox tomorrow.
Yeah can I get adblock on iPhone with Firefox?
There are adblockers extensions for iphone, like adGuard. It will remove ads on Safari (doesn't work with other browsers unfortunately)
You can with Firefox Focus! Though to be clear, safari with AdGuard is much better. Even better when used together NextDNS and the HaGaZi blocklist.
You can use pihole and route your traffic there with a vpn such as tailscale to block ads and more
When mouthing this opinion back on Reddit I got swamped with downvotes and crypto apologists immediately. But in my opinion brave is shady af and I don’t see their value over Firefox and a reasonable ad blocker, maybe a pi-hole and anti tracking.
I made roughly $1200 using Brave at work.
It is optional to open the ad or not and you do get paid half what you would even if you don’t view the ad. I turned on max number of adds per hour and clicked no most of the time. Took me maybe 10 seconds per hour while I was getting paid to work already. Sure the per ad money got poor over time, but at first it wasn’t so bad at first and I was making a couple bucks per day. Converted that to Bitcoin every month and that has nearly doubled in price. So if I converted to USD right now I’m at $1200 for a grand total of under 9 hours worth of work over 1.5 years. So my hourly pay plus clicking no to the ad I made $166 a hour on average.
My company’s software stopped working with Brave about half a year ago and now I use Firefox.
I might be wrong, as I’ve never used Brave, but isn’t it the case that they remove ads from the actual content owners and replace them with their own ads, basically monetizing other people’s content? I block all ads in my browser, don’t get me wrong, but what Brave is doing seems a bit shady to me.
No. The ads from brave itself are only on new tabs and notifications.
They do that, but not in that way. The websites will appear without ads, but once in a while their ad will pop up in a new window/tab. This is optional though
No, you can take your own BAT out and sell it. It's been some time but I believe they have a function to sell directly on an exchange. Else, you'll need to buy Ethereum and use it to transfer to any other exchange
Like a lot of things, it was good at first. Then they made it shitty.
I had small ads that I barely noticed, no need for any crypto account, and it gave me 5~10€/month to automatically send to Wikipedia (or any website I felt like paying).
Now that crypto account is mandatory it's just useless...
I still use it on a few devices but mainly because I'm too lazy to replace it by something else.
On windows the adverts are a little windows notification that pops up in the bottom right and you can ignore it or click close. I wouldn’t call that a nightmare. What do they look like for you and what platform are you using?
I don’t care about the “utility of the crypto”, it’s just free money to me. I use brave with bing to do what I already do, and I get paid in Microsoft rewards and brave crypto that I can sell. Win-win.
I don’t care about any advertisers, and I damn well aren’t sending any of them any money lol.
The problem isn’t the ads, it’s the quantity. And they turn themselves into OS level alerts, that you train yourself to ignore
You can literally choose the quantity that you want to see though. You're choosing to have them pop up, and how often, based on how much you want to earn. You can choose none, or every option between 1 and 10 per hour. I choose 10 because then I get paid the most and I literally just click "close" on the little popup that comes up in the bottom right of the screen, or I just ignore it.
Have you actually used it?
Not since the last time they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar,
So if my information is out of date, whoops. But they are still scumbags, particularly with that CEO
I thought it was supposed to be the best privacy browser but after reading these comments my view has changed completely and have switched all devices to Firefox.