The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

It's the hype from Cryptobros pushing it because it has crypto functionally and its own shitcoin.

Personally, I never liked how it wants to monetize your browsing time constantly and pushes a lot of crypto shit in its advertising. Vivaldi is much better as an alternative imo.

- Oh, Vivaldi. I really want to love it, I love the interface and general ideas, but the fact that in 2023 they didn’t manage yet to have an app for iOS and decided to focus first on embedding an email client inside the browser throw me off the boat. Also, there were plenty of bugs often with new releases. Maybe now it’s better but a few years ago it was quite annoying.
  
  I guess you can install whatever browser Apple lets you then.
  
  The reason why Vivaldi is not on iOS or iPadOS is because Vivaldi hasn’t developed it, not because Apple doesn’t let them in. All the other browsers are on iOS.
- It's as bloated as you want it. Everything's customisable.

I used Brave for a out 6 months, but I'm really turned off by the devs. I switch to FF and am loving it. It's much improved from when I last used in decades ago.

- Firefox? How so?
  
  People are still crying because Mozilla removing the security nightmare that was XUL that was an anything goes type of interface for making extensions.

I use it as my main browser and I honestly can't go back to Firefox, but I really dislike some parts of it and of it's community. The browser itself is fast, its default ad-blocker is awesome and there are a couple functionnalities that are nice to see, like Tor integration. But they block ads to show you their ads instead, that you cannot block even if you deactivate the "Brave Rewards". The whole reward system in BAT is kind of shady; they need to authenticate you before you can withdraw anything and it's worth peanuts anyway. When I complained about those issues on reddit, I got answers that looked like they were produced by sect members, and it wasn't even on a related sub.

- I really despise Firefox because (checks notes) I, uhh... love giving Google hegemony over web standards?
- Sure, I can, but it would be a hassle and I'm kind of comfortable with what I have now. The first thing that hit me when I tried to get back to firefox (a couple weeks ago) was actually the time to load a page. It felt long compared to what I am use to. Sure it's anecdotic, but I opened a game called factoryidle that ran capped at 200 fps on Brave, it was only at 70-80 fps on Firefox. The adblocker I had installed was also inferior to Brave's. I guess it may be due to some extensions or I don't know, but something was wrong and I didn't want to do the effort to fix it.
  It's like I want to believe, but as you say, I'm too lazy. I will try Ungoogled Chromium since you recommand it.
  
  I am forever a Firefox fan but Chromium is just faster on all my devices. Chrome without Google is great.
Can I ask where you see Brave ads? I deactivated everything and haven't seen any of their own ads
- If you use Brave News (to display a RSS feed), you get "news" about Brave's functionnalities. They appear as any other widget in your feed, but are marked as "Advertisement" on the upper right corner. Here is an example from my feed : https://imgur.com/a/RJV2Px2 .
  Looks like it's not the case anymore, but when I opened a new tab, some time ago, I used to get ads from Binance or other cryptocurrencies exchanges displayed as "cards" on the right of the window. Right now, I only get "cards" showing about "Brave Talks" or rewards, but it used to be advertisement about other products, such as Binance or other cryptocurrency company.
  I can't reproduce it right now, but some "new tab" backgrounds are (or were) also advertisement for crypto-related products.
  There was also a controversy some time ago where they were injecting their own referral link when you typed a cryptocurrency exchange's URL on the search bar : https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caught-adding-its-own-referral-codes-to-some-cryptcurrency-trading-sites/ . They stopped after it got viral.
  At least they are tagging their ads as such, but it's weird how you can't block any of it when they decide it's there.
  
  I see, thanks for explaining. I used to get ads on every other new tab, but found that I could disable that in the Customize menu. I've only been using Brave for a few months, but it's been a really good experience as it's been the fastest browser for me, especially for maps. I still use Librewolf as well, which I highly recommend. I am privacy-focused, but honestly this article doesn't deter me from using the browser and it seems like a lot of the comments here didn't read the article or don't understand that Brave Browser is different from Brave Search. I've been happy with Duck Duck Go for years, so I don't use Brave Search.
Brave ads are opt-in.
At some point you opted-in.
If you don't like it, then next time opt-out now or don't opt-in next time.
- I opted out and I still see ads. That's the problem.

that's why I point people at librewolf

Read the article though. It's bullshit

Sorry, elaborate
- They misunderstood what Brave said. Brave provides an API to help machines do search queries, and they understood that Brave provided data for LLM training. That's completely different

It's a shame that there isn't a good alternative for Apple devices, though. iOS doesn't have much by the way of good ad blockers.

It’s a shame that ~~there isn’t a good alternative for Apple devices, though. iOS doesn’t have much by the way of good ad blockers~~ Apple infringes on your property rights by refusing to relinquish control of your device to you, the owner, even after they "sold" it to you.
FTFY.
- A little agressive, but yes, they dont reliquish access to your devce after purchase. "Calling home" being the catch-all term for devices that are fully or parially sending requests to its true owners for commands to run or data to give.

What are your setting os Firefox? What do you recomend?

@Compactor9679 @PrivateOnions uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Multi-account Containers, Facebook Container, and Decentraleyes are the basic extensions you’d want. Then disable pocket and telemetry in settings. There’s more but that’s a pretty good starting configuration.
install just adblock origin and consentomatic and the quality of your internet experience will increase 10 fold. that's really all you need and then you can add on some more extensions later.
The Containers extension is the only thing you really need IMO. Firefox is already very privacy focused, and its default settings are pretty good.
- lol no, firefox without adblock origin is like sex with a hooker with no condom.
- With First Party Isolation is place, containers now add up very little to your privacy to be honest. They are mostly helpful in convenient compartmentalization of your browsing activities without actually having two different browsers.
  Firefox is already very privacy focused, and its default settings are pretty good.
  Partially incorrect. There is unnecessary telemetry that you would prefer to get rid of, for an example there is a setting for extensions recommendation as you browse. Also, probably because of their deal with Google, Firefox defaults to Google's location services even though Mozilla has its own. You may want to change that as well for better privacy. I am only citing a handful few examples, there is more for you to dig in. uBO is a must have with right set of filters enabled according to your own privacy threat vectors. There is a reason hardening is a common practice among Firefox users.
- Didn’t Firefox install adware on everyone’s instance in an overnight update? Like idk why people swoon over Firefox.
  
  I dont know what you mean exactly, mabe fennec (and other ff forks) is keeping me safe from these changes
  
  https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
  
  Lol, no
  
  https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass

Brendan Eich, the guy who co-founded Firefox and developed Javascript, is the CEO of Brave. His politics aside, I think he's a pretty trustworthy guy.

I hate to burst your bubble but when it comes to 6-7digits of cash at stake what does "trustworthy" even mean? You mean between millions and his word to you he will choose his word? His previously stated values and principles?
The guy who made waterfox seemed pretty nice, friendly, committed to the cause, then sold the project to a data-miner, and so did the honest people who made startpage, the trustworthy privacy minded search engine? Now they see waterfox is independent again and not part of the big multi-natinal data miner.
Mozilla once again made a sudden change that breaks your previous profile or other functionality and if you dare roll back the upgrade your profile has been ruined in transition, so you are forced to start from scratch reconfiguring, setting up you std tabs, bookmarks, history .. Same stuff with TB, addons/plugins disabled, new "features" added, whether you trust them or not, added dependencies .. you roll back you lose.
The google chrome-engine is so intrusive in the way it runs, degoogled or not, it is hell to have on a system. Maybe inside a vm without anything else other than specific browser session may be ?ok? for fluff work, nothing private I hope.
The naivity of people to accept and sometimes welcom large corporations producing FOSS is what got us to this mess, and I don't mean users, but devs, distro managers, .. if it is legally FOSS it is OK, even if it is a huge trojan horse manufactured by corporations to penetrate an other wise safe and secure system. FOSS - no corporate involvement - may be it, but will it boot? LinFound. gets millions and millions to have board seats to influence kernel, and it seems to be dancing with their wishes.
- So if Firefox and Chrome are dogshit, what do we use to browse the web?
  
  lynx elinks links :)
- I think FOSS is enough because as long as you can fully read the code, it can be audited and even forked to remove BS. So I’m fine with companies developing FOSS. I don’t even really care about EEE. We can always maintain a fork of the standard at the moment you fucked with it. We can even still get your upstream changes just with the shit cherry picked out! It’s always a win.
  
  Have you audited any of it? Would you like to try gcc or systemd for that matter? By the time you go through 1% of it the code has changed already. How many times in the past years has tremendous security breaches been caused by FOSS and was discovered months after it was in effect, and some of this by coincidence, or corporate teams that review code.
  
  The fact I haven’t doesn’t mean I can’t read auditors who have, who do keep track of these changes. Zero days are usually caused by things no one noticed, not things that were intentionally added by corporate overlords to spy or back door a FOSS app.
  
  Speck was pushed and provided by Google to linux, they added the content to the kernel having your naive belief, it was later found containing a backdoor to ALL systems, and Google raised their hands up and said it was passed to us by NSA. Is this what happened? Or did I dream all this up?
  Facebook provided 0 FOSS, not a bit, suddenly they make an algorithm they "bought" including the author, and make it foss, to build it it needs google software, like a bush fire more than half of distributions adopt it and all data provided as comparative to xz are false, based on poor use of xz to make zstd appear better, while still admitting zstd can never attain the level of compression, but it is fast (ONLY when xz is run on a single thread while zstd is multithread by default). They claim xz sums are different when run on 1 cpu or many, still not true.
  Just wait for that bomb to explode, the guy who wrote the code for zstd doesn't seem possible to have enough knowledge to write it, he appears as a front for something.
  Things that smell like shit don't have to be actually tasted to be called shit.
- Fair points.
Brendan Eich, the guy who... developed Javascript
You say that as if it's a point in his favor, LOL.
If not for that asshole, we could've had a decent language embedded in the browser, like Scheme or Python!
- I mean.. if there wasn't someone inventing a usable open source language for the browser it could have been some weird proprietary Microsoft language and our sites would still look like web 1.0
  
  I didn't mention Scheme and Python randomly; they were the other options Netscape was considering.
  
  Oh.
What he took credit for he didn't invent himself, Also he is a total piece of shit.