If you are keen on personal privacy, you might have come across Brave Browser. Brave is a Chromium-based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad-blocking and content-blocking protection. It also offers several quality-of-life features and services, like a VPN and Tor access. I mean, it’s even listed on the reputable PrivacyTools website. Why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser, then?
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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.
God damnit.
Every browser I switched to since Firefox has been a good user experience, and then I find out some horrible bullshit.
Is there any safe browser that isn’t run by hateful assholes?
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:
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- Brendan Eich donated to anti-LGBT political organizations, politicians, and initiatives such as CA Prop 8 which banned same-sex marriages.
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- 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”.
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- 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.
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2020 — Brave injects referral links when visiting crypto wallets
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- Brave injected their own referral links for services such as Binance without informing users or asking permission.
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- Brave turned their home screen image rotator into a place to serve ads, many of which were suspicious or crypto related.
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- Brave added a Tor feature which exposed users DNS requests
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- 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.
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2024 - So-called “privacy browser” deprecated advanced fingerprinting protection
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- Brave removed a the Strict, Block Fingerprinting privacy feature from their browser.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
I don’t use Brave as my main browser but I think some of the accusations are not fair.
- TOR Feature. I don’t think it was deliberately done. Similarly Firefox revealed your up address even if you used VPN while using. As long as there was no malicious intent we can’t say anything other than that they software has big bugs.
- Yes, it is questionable what they do for getting money but same can be said for most donations or schemes that FOSS use. There was long discussions about the money Mozilla receives from Google, or things Opera did (basically similar to Brave)
- Getting news from right wing is useful if you ever need to do research, I had a course in uni about anti-islam and getting really right wings news was difficult. We all knew the same 2 sites.
- The political opinion of the CEO is concerning but not important enough. In that case I’m wholly on the same boat as the developer of the Factorio, if Hitler were to make good Browsers I’d use them.
- It is also important to note most of the problems are in the past. Sure it means there are likely a lot we could not find and it is annoying to use a product where they would exploit you if they are given a chance.
That said Brave is still #1 Browser I’d recommend someone installing. If I can I’d install Firefox myself, but on the phone it is what I recommend. I don’t trust my uncle to install Firefox and install uBlock etc. on top of it. But I trust him to install Brave and use it.
Most privacy minded Browsers like Libre Wolf have restrictions, like not enabling WebRTC out of the box, meaning using Zoom, Meet etc is not possible. There are people who are forced to use such software and not able to tweak with config files. Some people think just because they can do it, everybody should be able to. I think it is a good choice to recommend to people, very good in place replacement for Chrome, you can even take your bookmarks and addons with you
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.
My take: No other browser is sustainable without advertising. Orion looks to be that guy, but we will see. We’ve already seen many other browsers stop development, like Mull and LibreWolf, due to lack of resources. Firefox itself is on the chopping block with Google potentially being forced to sell Chrome. We’ll see what Kagi is able to manage with Orion, though releasing it with pretty much all the features one could want for free doesn’t appear promising. I think taking a “private advertising” approach is the best we’re going to get. This makes Brave sustainable.
The CEO is a dick, no doubt, but they pretty much all are, and every browser has it’s drawbacks.
As far as the useragent, I kinda agree with Brave on that one. Sites want to be crawled by Google but they will block anyone else, which obviously creates an anticompetitive environment in an industry that severely needs competition.
As for the fingerprinting, I kinda get it. I’m sure some users were turning on strict protection and then complaining about the browser not working properly and ultimately ditching it while complaining to others. That being said, even with “standard” fingerprint blocking, Brave is the only browser I’ve used on CoverYourTracks and it returned “you have a randomized fingerprint”. I’m not any sort of tech genius but I think the folks at EFF are and I trust them.
We’ve already seen many other browsers stop development, like (…) LibreWolf, due to lack of resources.
Wait, what?
Two things:
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When did Librewolf stop development?
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On funding, they say in their FAQ:
If we don’t need funding, we won’t risk becoming dependent on it. And also: no donations means no expectations. This means that people working on LibreWolf are free to move on to other projects whenever they want.
Librewolf seems to very consciously not looking for “resources” from advertising or donations, or etc. The only resource they seem to want is motivation.
Which I think is one of the big issues with OSS projects - many are based around a very small number of people being motivated to work on something for free. And it dies if that stops.
I think that having expectations and funding to continue is important, like you say.
But I’m still confused about what you mean by the “resources” comment re: Librewolf.
When did Librewolf stop development?
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/issues/1906
“Hey all, I’m on the LibreWolf team, and it’s true that since the departure of @fxbrit the project has taken a total nosedive when it comes to keeping up to date with Arkenfox and settings in general. We’re still making releases, but settings did not get updated.”
“As @threadpanic said, since fxbrit left we have been in a kind of “maintenance” mode in terms of settings. Mainly because we are really only three people left”
“LW since fxbrit left/died/who-knows has gone to shit - I worked with him behind the scenes to make the right choices and while he would do his own analysis, we always agreed, and his voice influenced them. Now they don’t know what they are doing, and in fact have compromised security and make really stupid decisions. Same goes for all the other forks - really dubious shit going”
Which I think is one of the big issues with OSS projects - many are based around a very small number of people being motivated to work on something for free. And it dies if that stops.
Exactly.
But I’m still confused about what you mean by the “resources” comment re: Librewolf.
“Resources” can refer to many different things, in this case it is motivation/prioritization.
Thanks.
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Brave search allows misinformation goggles for anyone that believes 2 + 2 = 5.
