The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

Just use Firefox, it's always been the best out of them for Privacy

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- @Astaroth Have you try this? https://www.howtogeek.com/557929/how-to-see-and-disable-the-telemetry-data-firefox-collects-about-you/
  
  Or: https://librewolf.net/
  
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- However I can’t seem to turn off the telemetry at all…
  
  Which telemetry, specifically? Anything you can't find in the standard settings menu can be found in about:config. There are plenty of articles with huge lists of settings to adjust in about:config with explanations on what different values do.
Every time I try to use Firefox I run into the same incredibly annoying issue.

Sometimes tabs will randomly not work. I'll open a new tab, go to, say, Google, and it will just hang, it never loads. Doesn't matter what site I try to load. It happens seemingly randomly. Sometimes it won't happen on the first page load, but the second.

It's the entire reason I witched to brave, because I couldn't figure the problem out and every time I posted to reddit about it I would be told that nothing was wrong and it must be my add-ons, despite the fact it also happened when I un-installed all of them.

It persisted to a new install, too. No idea what caused it and it's so annoying that I don't want to bother trying...
- That's a shame. I use FF most of my day for work and I've never had any issues like that. I was thinking of add-ons too, but since you uninstalled them all AND it carried to a new installation.
  
  I use Brave for my personal stuff, but Brave has had some dodgy stuff in recent times and I don't trust other browser's than FF right now.
  
  Yeah the weirdest part for me was that it carried to a new install; I've NEVER seen another program where that happened. But it happened THREE different times, it 100% carried over, or at the least was so inherent to something in my setup that it started happening again within 2 days of re-installing.
  
  Try disabling HTTP/3 (network.http.http3.enable).
- I'm not on my PC to double check right now but maybe turn hardware acceleration off (or on, not sure what default is) I remember having issues years and years ago and I believe it was hardware acceleration. Worth a shot at least.
  
  Can't say I've experienced the same issue as you though.
  
  Alternatively could always try Librewolf

Brave’s been super shady its entire existence. They’ve been caught linkjacking and accepting “donations” for websites that don’t have accounts (so theft via fraud).

If you are talking about BAT, you should know that creators can sign up to get the BAT owed to them.
- How many will though? They are still soliciting donations without the claimed recipients knowledge
  
  "Solicitating donations" isn't really how BAT works. Users who use brave earn BAT. Users who opt in to sharing their BAT will share BAT with a wallet under custody of Brave. Users who visit youtuberx's channel in brave and spend x amount of time there will earn youtuberx y BAT. When a creator verifies who they are, they get custody of their BAT wallet with the BAT contained within.
  
  You could say that "share with content creators" is soliciting donations, but it comes from the money you get from using the browser, choosing to see notification based ads and then earning BAT over time. It's more of "turn your ad views into money to automatically give to the content creators you interact with most."
  
  They get real money for as views that they then act as if they will dispense it for the toy bucks users can "earn", knowing that most creators will never claim them=> time arbitrage in the best case, flat out false advertising/fraud in the worst case. Just because it's microcents doesn't change the facts
  
  Ok, now compare this behavior with all other advertising schemes, where only the marketers profit.
  
  Edit: ok, I'll elaborate so people don't automatically assume I am some shill. I use brave as another browser but not my primary browser (firefox), have a wallet account with a few pennies worth of BAT. I have also been involved in the marketing industry for a while when I was younger, as a tech support person and as someone working to build an ad blocker of sorts.
  
  Bottom line is marketing on the internet is awful. The default is programmatic ads, each of which loads its own slew of trackers when they win the bid for your eyeballs. Oh yeah, each programmatic ad view is a bidding war for brands and advertisers to try to show an ad at a specific slot on the page for you, the viewer the trackers already know lots about. Brands pay, marketers take a profit, sites hosting the ads take a small profit, more of your data (e.g., the site you visited and what was on that site) gets added to more trackers, which increases the value of your data, allowing trackers to earn more money from selling your data to more programmatic platforms... and while you site and read CreatorXYZ's blog for hours, they get nothing. CreatorXYZ was never involved, why would they get money?
  
  Google had a nicer idea.. let's just show small, targeted ads to help pay for gmail. Nicer because at least to begin with you are only dealing with google, not directly with platforms that can sell your data. Google has your data (all email providers do) and scans your data to give you ads. That's creepy but did you read the part about programmatic? What's worse here, one company using data to push more and text-only ads to you, not sharing your data with third parties without your knowledge, or a free for all where any advertiser can plug into any tracking platform which already has your data from visiting other websites, that then sells your data and continues to track you on the greater internet? But with the case with Google ads, CreatorXYZ's wallet doesn't increase because you happen to be on CreatorXYZ's site. Brands spend money, google profits off charging for views of ads and clicks, but presumably only that, since other trackers aren't involved with gmail.
  
  Now let's look at Brave. Brave ads are optional, and something you opt into. So, by default, no ads served, no harm done.
  
  Let's say you want to opt into Brave ads, and you do so. You see some notifications (yes, like system or browser notifications) pop up for ads. You can control how often you see these ads. Brave (as a browser) already knows a lot about you at the local level and could use this info to show you ads without even sharing that information with themselves (as would be the case for web based browsers). You get a small amount of BAT for seeing the ads. Fractions of a penny. You see some ads which spark your interest and so you click. You spend some time on the advertisers site, you earn a little more BAT. The advertiser may not even be aware who you are (as brave has a built in ad blocker so this would have to get around that), the browser sends the ad so there aren't any trackers or even html or javascript used. Ads are just text based. Advertisers pay, brave gets a profit, no other companies get your information, including the advertisers. Now here's the weird thing, because BAT is pretty useless as a form of currency (you aren't going to be able to mine it really, and it has very little value), you may just decide to automatically share your BAT with creators. You enable this feature and go back to read more of CreatorXYZ's blog. You spend a few hours on that blog and a small fraction of your BAT is held in a wallet, earmarked for the creator. The internet is big and not everyone has a direct deposit number on their site, so this escrow system was created to hold value until creators claim their wallet. This is your money (BAT) which you earned for just doing internet stuff and not minding ads. You can keep it, you can exchange it for USD and you can buy a pack of gum with it someday. But, because you and hundreds or maybe even thousands of readers to CreatorXYZ's blog have enabled this sharing, there is something like $25 in the CreatorXYZ's BAT wallet. Hopefully with this number of brave users, one of them will message CreatorXYZ, or CreatorXYZ will read about this program. CreatorXYZ signs up, gets $25 for free.
  
  Literally I do not understand the concern with Brave ads. More advertising needs to go this way. I don't like being a product.
  
  Advertising simply needs to go away, as long as it's there you are a product. Brave is putting lipstick on a pig
  
  What do you propose we replace it with? Or rather.. when people who have money want to buy market share, what do we tell them? As long as capitalism is a thing i think we are going to have advertising. Big industries like advertising don't just go away.
  
  Ideally: fuck off, put that money into wages and high quality products, getarkrt share organically.
  
  Intermittently: all advertising only gets put on platforms that explicitly aggregates advertising (maybe even need to get a license), banned everywhere else. Users who want to get advertised to can log into this website and browse ads. Your money buys you exposure on these sites. Kind of like we use producthunt to find new good shit.
  
  Advertising us stochastic coercion: whether I pay you 1mil to force 10000 people to buy my shit with physical force or to use psychological tricks to nudge 100 million people and it works on 10000 makes no difference morally
  
  Econ 101 kid.. learn it.

Install Firefox (also works on mobile!), add uBlock Origin (also available on mobile!), done.

*not on iOS **but soon will be due to EU laws (blink-based and gecko-based browsers will be available probably next year to comply with the law (yes worldwide, trying to region lock will result in 1) it won’t work anyway and 2) assdestroying fines from the EU for blatant violation)
And if you are feeling extra frisky, install noscript to pick and choose what sources of js you are willing to run and/or be terrified/furious of all the non-relevant scripts sites run.
- I actually did that for a while (on my PC at least). Major pain in the ass unfortunately.
  
  Of course it's good to block that crap, but usability takes too much of a nose dive. I do live in the EU though, so when it comes to data protection things have gotten a lot better in the last years.
  
  I’ve been using it for a few years now and by now picking out the scripts for site navigation and finding the relavant cdn is pretty much automatic now. If I find a site that is just an absolute js clusterfuck, I just run it in porno mode and let the scrips loose and hope for the best until I find what I went there for. I even take the time to reject cookies manually as per my right, haha. Maybe it will show up on some stat somewhere, a flaccid message, but a message none the less.
  
  What did you think of the recent deal the EU made with the giants? As an EU citizen I find it concerning, because it might be a slippery slope.
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- Ghostery is like Brave, they record and sell your browsing habbits. I stopped using them back in 2013.
  
  Seems like we need to have another talk with the less terminally-online people about what is and isn’t actually good int he world of web browsing safety…
  
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  I believe that is outdated. Ghostery's ownership changed quite a few years ago, along with their business model. Read here.
- Or you could just enable that filter in ublock origin. Will be faster and more robust as well.

The browser is fine. Nobody seems to have read the article. It’s about their search engine. It doesn’t have anything to do with privacy, instead it’s about copyright infringement.

I’m not sure why this was even posted here. Maybe OP didn’t read the article either.

I was suspicious as soon as I saw it runs on Chromium. I can safely assure you, Google is not focusing on privacy features there.

Chromium and Chrome are not the same thing.
- Per their wiki article, “Chromium is a free and open-source web browser project, mainly developed and maintained by Google.” Source, i suppose
  
  I know they’re different. I know it’s FOSS. I also know I do not believe Google is being altruistic and I do not have the expertise nor time to audit the code myself. I am not the subject matter expert here, but I know I’ve seen what Google can do and that certainly biases my opinion. I don’t believe any corporation that large is genuinely concerned about anything but capital acquisition.
  
  They arent being altruistic. Having their browser engine implementation being dominant gives them an incredible amount of pull in the space of web standards and their adoption.
  
  Some good has come out of this and the web has been advancing rapidly, but they have abused it plenty of times as well.
  
  I feel like we are all of the same opinions on this but somehow missing each other lol. Very obviously, Google has had a massive influence on technology and the internet as a whole. As you stated, there have been plenty of abuses of that power in the past, most commonly noted with privacy concerns and data collection. Hence, how I arrived at my original position with regards to Brave as a browser.

yeah, it is such a pain 😥. but hardened firefox 😏

Nope it’s always been bullshit, like Blue Buffalo.

Vivaldi is awesome. Both for desktop and android.

Why do people just don't use something like Firefox or any forks of it. Its the only browser which is truly still Open Source
- I use Fennec (for android), maintained by Mozilla and no possible Google-Play shennanigans.
  
  Mull 😏
- which is truly still Open Source
  
  How so? Chromium is fully open source and functional. There is the ungoogled chromium fork that removes all features tied to google from it. It's fully open source by all definitions.