[RattleyCooper]

Brave browser seems to have figured out a way to make money on ads without sacrificing user data/privacy. If you opt in to their ads they basically sync ad campaigns to your browser and then use local browsing profiles that don't get sent to any servers to decide which ads to show you. It all happens on your computer and it doesn't send your profile to anybody, so the only user data involved is "user looked at an ad, but we have no idea who actually looked at it".

[freediver]

How do you know it is not sacrificing user data/privacy? It sends a lot of requests 'home' to their servers with your private information like IP address in them. At best you should be wary of that. If privacy is your concern you should look for a zero-telemetry browser, and even better if ads are not their primary business model.

[RattleyCooper]

It's REALLY easy to check what the browser is doing and multiple people have. There was an article floating around claiming it phones home but many people very quickly pointed out that the author was mistaken, at best (they thought some CSS or something completely normal being loaded in the background was brave "phoning home").

[freediver]

The question is not what the browser is doing (which is easily verifiable with a network proxy, even without the browser being open source), but the question is what the server is doing with the data that is being sent to it by the browser, and that data includes PII like the IP address.

The best way to remove this question is for browsers to be zero-telemetry which is what I was advocating for.