FAfastball·Jun 18, 2021
A rebuttal of the points in the article, as most of it is arguing in bad faith:
> Brave's adblocker is uBlock origin
It's not[1].
> Brave Today can't be disabled
Currently called "Brave News" if you're looking for it. And of course it actually can be disabled[2].
> Rewards is used to track you
A request being made to a URL does not mean you are being "tracked". Brave ads are the most privacy-preserving ad architecture[3] I know about, and they are the only people trying to make a better funding model for the web that still has a lot of the upsides of ad-driven content (mainly that it is not a regressive funding model). FF is worse in this regard because Mozilla gets most of their revenue from adtech giants that clearly don't give a flying fuck about your privacy. If you think Mozilla's funding model isn't a conflict of interest and makes
Read the rest
the web more privacy-conscious, I have a bridge to sell you.
> Telemetry automatically violates your privacy
Not really? Of course, someone very concerned with privacy should opt out of telemetry, and Brave lets you do that.
> Auto-updates violate privacy
How so? As I point out later, the most likely result of auto-updates is that they help preserve your privacy by getting bugs patched faster.
> Affiliate codes
Yes, Brave had pre-programmed history items that were affiliate links to a crypto exchange. This harmed nobody in any way and the backlash was over-the-top. But they disabled in response to user feedback. I kinda liked this idea, as it is another way Brave was trying to fund themselves without being beholden to the Googlopoly which is an endeavor I very much support (with the caveat that it can't hurt users, which again this did not).
> Uphold doesn't care about your privacy
Uphold is a financial institution based in the US (as Brave is) which by necessity needs to comply with KYC/AML regulations. That means they need to collect your personal info. Take it up with the US government if you're unhappy.
> Tor tabs leaking DNS
Was fixed fairly quickly[4] and I think worth pointing out that no other browser even bothers trying to do something like this (integrating Tor for better privacy). Conveniently left out of the part where the author made the claim that "Brave isn't better for privacy than FF because it's just uBlock origin". Clearly brave is trying things that are not just adblocking to increase user privacy.
In general with this point, kinda funny that apparently the author of this article wants Brave to be the only software engineering org in existence that never has bugs. I guess if that's your stance though it makes sense that you wouldn't want auto-updates. For everyone else that lives in reality, auto-updates are a good thing for security (and therefore privacy, as made clear here when a privacy-related bug inevitably happens).
> Chromium and Google’s monopoly
Yeahhhhh, using FF isn't the silver bullet you think it is, as again, Mozilla gets the vast majority of their revenue from being paid by Google. What happens if that dries up? Seems unlikely that maintaining Blink without Mozilla will be easier than Brave maintaining a privacy-centric fork of Chromium (which will presumably continue to get not-privacy-related upstream improvements from Google/Microsoft/etc in perpetuity).
> brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com fetches 5 extensions and installs them. It is said that this might be a backdoor. But I don’t want to get conspiracist. I prefer giving you verifiable facts. I’ll limit myself to inform you about suspicious activities.
This is worse than all the Bitcoin maximalists / shitcoin pump-and-dumpers with their "this is not financial advice" shtick. We know what you're doing, it's pretty transparent. Especially when you do it twice:
> They were also accused of theft with BAT but this isn’t verifiable so I’ll only link the source for you.
In summary, I disagree with basically all of this article, significant parts of which are just factually wrong.
[1] https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust
[2] https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056341952-How...
[3] https://brave.com/intro-to-brave-ads/
[4] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/13527