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by jacooper 1463 days ago
> 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.

3 comments

>>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?

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

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.

>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?

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.