[assemblylang]

>Does anybody find the constant promotion of Brave on HN annoying?

Yes, its extremely annoying, and I do not trust anyone saying positive things about Brave or its other product offerings. Brave is a shady company that:

>puts profits over privacy

>impersonates well known influencers to sell their products without their knowledge

>constantly pushes their cryptocurrency, functionality completely unrelated to web browsing and of negative value to anyone caring about their privacy

>their search results appear to be based off of google, despite claiming an independent index. all of your queries may just be going to google anyways

>the browser frequently sends telemetry to their servers

>they have consistently added more spyware to the browser unless users en masse call them out, which only happens some of the time

I don't think for a second you are being downvoted by real hacker news users. Brave has created some sort of native marketing arm or something that drowns out any criticisms with vague positive comments like "I've been using brave search, more privacy and better search results than google!". Something is truly fishy about Brave, and I refuse to go anywhere near their products.

[ALittleLight]

I use Brave. It's basically chrome with a built-in ad blocker. I have no experience of Brave "pushing" their cryptocurrency, which I don't use and not using it hasn't negatively impacted me in any way. I think I see an option for it on the "new tab" screen, but that's it.

As for valuing profits over privacy - I was just reading an old Scott Alexander post on inconsistent rigor. Do you apply this standard to everything? You don't work with any company that values profits over privacy? Or, perhaps, when you dislike a company do you bring out strong criticism that would equally impeach almost every other company you do business with?

Brave is a good browser and a decent search engine. I use the search about 60/40 with Google and I hope that grows over time.

Since we're indulging in conspiracy theories here, I'll just throw out that mine is that you have ideological motives to dislike Brave and those motivate your criticism. Which is fine, I have ideological reasons to dislike Google, I just don't pretend that Google services are bad.

[assemblylang]

>Since we're indulging in conspiracy theories here

Are you Brave's native marketing arm at work? When I open up wireshark and I see telemetry sent back to Brave after I open the browser, must be a conspiracy right?

I find it funny that you did not even try to refute the points about them impersonating people to sell their products or the telemetry in their browser. You instead deflected into a combination of "whatabout-ism" and then say the same vague positive statements "Brave is a good browser and a decent search engine."

I think Brave is shady, explain to me why they are not using technical merit. I will fully admit that I may not know all the facts, and I'm willing to hear you out, so explain why they impersonate people to sell their product.

>Do you apply this standard to everything?

Yes, if a company markets one thing, I expect them to deliver on that marketing promise. Brave markets privacy, and they do not deliver.

>I'll just throw out that mine is that you have ideological motives to dislike Brave and those motivate your criticism.

Explain further. What is my motivation here? That I'm tired of the Brave spam? That I want a browser that is actually private, like Librewolf or Ungoogled Chromium?

[ALittleLight]

When I was young I was stung by a scorpion that had been hiding in my dirty clothes. My father told me "This is why you should clean your room. The scorpions won't have so many places to hide." I told him that I would rather be stung by a scorpion once a year (or so) than do the ceaseless work of keeping my room clean. I feel the same about the kind of privacy concerns you are raising here.

Maybe Brave telemetry is reporting stuff I don't care about - time spent in the browser, number of tabs open, crashes, etc. Maybe Brave telemetry is secretly smuggling data I do care about and they are using that for nefarious purposes. I would rather deal with occasionally being stung by the latter than spend my time worrying about it and restricting myself to open source, carefully audited, minimal risk tools.

As far as impersonating people to sell their products, I don't really know what you mean. I'm guessing it's something about them creating profiles to receive BAT tokens on their behalf until such time as those people joined the Brave ecosystem (if they do). I see this as a "growth hack" and maybe distasteful but not a deal breaker.

[potemkin_buster]

TBH most the concern is overblown - anonymous-ish (there's always something someone can do) be default and easy to toggle off and the source is aviaible

all of the developers i've interacted with at brave have also been pretty chill

there's not as much news about other browsers here because they aren't doing much newsworthy, like this article growing a search engine

[bdlowery]

The only thing missing from your post is

“- sent from Google Chrome”

[jacooper]

> puts profits over privacy

And its still the most private consumer grade browser out there

https://privacytests.org

>impersonates well known influencers to sell their products without their knowledge

That's has been fixed, it affected the minority as crypto is disabled by default on brave.

>their search results appear to be based off of google, despite claiming an independent index. all of your queries may just be going to google anyways

If you have spent maybe 5 minutes using Brave search, you would see the difference, while Google is filled with stupid SEO spam, Brave has a forums section front and center.

And matching Google's index is a very very good thing, brave search is already better than DDG and probably also bing.

People want google results with better privacy.

>the browser frequently sends telemetry to their servers

Compared to what ?

Have you compared their telemetry to any other browser ?

Their telemetry is less than Firefox for sure.

>they have consistently added more spyware to the browser unless users en masse call them out, which only happens some of the time

Like what?, what is your definition of spyware?

> I don't think for a second you are being downvoted by real hacker news users. Brave has created some sort of native marketing arm or something that drowns out any criticisms with vague positive comments like "I've been using brave search, more privacy and better search results than google!".

This is just ridiculous, Because people like a browser which has actual privacy protections by default, an independent search engine, and an alternative ad network(that is disabled by default), they are bots or paid shells!

There is no one doing effective things to protect privacy in a friendly way like brave into the browser space, call me when Mozilla dares to block Ads or create a search engine, what they do is just increase the CEO salary while firing engineers, and then go on a political rant about fake news.

All other browsers require tweaks and changes, while with brave from your first click you are more private, I can give it to my grandma and she would be more private by just using it.

[cbm-vic-20]

>>impersonates well known influencers to sell their products without their knowledge > That's has been fixed, it affected the minority as crypto is disabled by default on brave.

"We got caught doing something shady and fixed it" has been used a number of times by Brave. That's not a good look for a team that's presenting themselves as the white knights of the internet. Why would they be doing that shady stuff in the first place?

[jacooper]

I agree, it isn't perfect, but nothing really is. Firefox has a unique key for every installer that can link people together, and runs Ads on the home page which is new (on brave its enable by default since brave ADs started)

[manmal]

Companies are prone to Groupthink: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

[freediver]

> And its still the most private consumer grade browser out there https://privacytests.org

It should be disclosed that this site is ran by a Brave employee and many choices are influenced by how Brave handles certain things. Regardless of that fact, I have a lot of problems with how are privacy-respecting features presented on this site, clearly amplifying one way of looking at things.

For example the site completely omits the most important test of a privacy respecting browser - is it zero telemetry by default or not. This is where browser privacy begins.

Or a 'privacy' test filtering __s query param (which Brave incidently filters). I would totally use a param like __s in my early dev days.

We need an independent, 3rd party, privacy tests alternative.

[arthuredelstein]

Hi -- I'm the maintainer of privacytests.org. To be clear, most of these tests were built before I applied to work for Brave. And I am committed to keeping the tests impartial.

I do hope to include telemetry tests in the future.

[assemblylang]

>And its still the most private consumer grade browser out there

>All other browsers require tweaks and changes, while with brave from your first click you are more private, I can give it to my grandma and she would be more private by just using it.

100% false. Ungoogled Chromium and Librewolf have zero telemetry. Brave has telemetry built in. Librewolf also comes with adblock built in, no tweaks required at all. Why should I use Brave over Ungoogled Chromium or Librewolf? Why are you defending a browser that is _not private by default_ when community-driven, conflict of interest free browsers exist?

[jacooper]

I said consumer grade because I knew comments like this are coming.

Ungoogled chromium doesn't have ad block by default, and its default options are extreme.

Librwolf is even worse than UG, they disable WebGL, IPv6, WebRTC, Sync, and many other options that will break many websites, and you can't even change these options without a manual override file!

It really unusable for any normal consumer, even as an advanced user i don't use them, hardened Firefox is extremely slow, and UG doesn't have sync or advanced privacy protections from Brave like De-amp and Emphermal storage.

[stjohnswarts]

All those accusations and no sources? eh....