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.

The CEO of brave is a homophobic bigot if that helps push anyone over the edge for changing their browser. It was the last straw for me.

This is a very well written an thorough article and I highly recommend reading it. If you don't want to however, here is a summary of the key points:

• Brendan Eich's anti-LGBTQ+ political involvement

• • Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.

• 2016 — Brave Browser promises to replace webpage 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".

• 2018 — Brave runs a questionable donation campaign

• • 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.

• 2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets

• • Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.

• 2020 — Brave puts ads in user's home screens

• • Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.

• 2021 - Brave ships an insecure Tor feature

• • Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests

• 2023 - Brave hides their crawlers to websites

• • 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.

• 2024 - So-called "privacy browser" deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection

• • Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.

• And More!

• • 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".

Edit: corrected a mistake noted below.

Brave search allows misinformation goggles for anyone that believes 2 + 2 = 5.

Thank goodness that we can post things in here without Braves astroturfed PR community galavanting to save face like what happened when any story against brave posted on the other site

the crypto and the asshole ceo aside, nobody should trust a browser that claims to respect privacy that's based on chromium.

anyone believing brave is good for privacy is quite naive

Don't forget about the fact that a while back they secretly whitelisted Facebook trackers in their adblocker to "make pages run more smoothly" they got a lot of shit for it when people found out looking through the source code. When I heard that they did that it basically cemented in my mind that they were shady and untrustworthy, that's in addition to the Crypto and rewards stuff.

Why I recommend against pushing people away from Brave:

Most people are still trapped in an ecosystem owned by either Microsoft, Google or Apple. We're yet to see a perfect web browser for everyone, but in the meantime we choose one, maybe two or three if we feel a bit more picky for each task, and use them to the best of our capacity. Making anyone feel guilty and ashamed for choices like this, when the best options are few, relative, and often come at a cost, is just useless.

I suggest reading the settings guides available at privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/ or checking the browser comparison at eylenburg.github.io/browser_comparison.htm to know the details that anyone who actually wants a better browsing experience cares about. Better to lend a hand than push around.

If whoever reads this still can't get over it and needs to play a blame game with someone about why everyone should boycott Mozilla, Brave, Proton and other privacy focused FOSS companies because of what someone said, did or thought, please at least find a decent fork, toss a coin to it's devs, share their work and help others benefit from it.

privacytools is not longer reputable. privacy guides started from it a few years ago for a reason.

Fascinating... I knew some of this and it is indeed troubling.

It seems that Brave's mission is actually about generating revenue by any method possible (including manipulation of end users) more than anything to do with privacy.

If you're cool with all that then Brave is for you I guess.

privacytools.io uses affiliate links. privacyguides.org does not.

Disabling Brave Rewards on a new installation is not any harder than disabling Firefox's Pocket crap, or Edge's Copilot integration, or Chrome's send-everything-to-Google behaviour.

I wish one day we can get a browser that serves the user instead of browser maker, but for now i'll keep using Brave (it's at least open source).

I've heard enough of this stuff over the years to never be tempted to try the browser out. At this point, I feel like it's claim to privacy is mostly marketing. Personally, I'm going to stick to LibreWolf.

Brave has great anti-fingerprinting measures I just wish I could get that without installing crypto malware on my pc