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The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training
(stackdiary.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Their crypto autofill scandal is all one needs to know about this company. If you're marketing your browser as privacy focused and then pull stunts like that you lose all credibility in my eyes. Forever.
Firefox or go bust
Not to mention the interesting bits of info you can find just by looking into the CEO of Brave, Brendan Eich. Plenty of reasons with him alone for someone to avoid the browser and search engine.
The big one that he likes to keep buried is that he donated money to an anti-gay marriage proposition in California back in 2011, which is what caused some of the pressure for him to step down as Mozilla CEO back in 2014 after being it for a few weeks.
Also, he invented JavaScript. He got on my shitlist permanently for that alone.
A necessary evil sadly. Never enjoyed having to program in JS, but I enjoy all the fanciness and convienence it brings the UX.
What does his political donations have to do with brave's misconduct here?
It has nothing to do with it, but I was commenting on a parent level comment to add more info about the stunts they pull that reduce their credibility, making it relevant to the parent comment, but not the overall post.
I don't understand this crypto auto fill thing. Can you explain it in simple terms? What is it. Why is it bad?
They replaced links to crypto exhange Binance with their own affiliate links that they profit from without the users concent. It's bad because they did it behind their user's backs hoping no one would notice. Makes me question what else they're not telling me about.
Ok.
Brave had a thing where if you went to website.com, they would add /ref=brave to the URL so they get a kickback as if you clicked on their referral link.
Sneaky? Sure. A huge scandal? I don't think so. No user data was being collected, no privacy was being violated. If I was the company doing the referral system I'd be mad, but as a user, it does not affect me at all.
Firefox fanatics just need something to point to and say "brave bad firefox good" and that is the worst thing they can find on Brave. It's all browser wars to them, like iPhone vs Android or Xbox vs Playstation.
The article in this post also does not affect users in anyway, and has been updated after Brave responded, with most of the worst claims of the article now retracted.
Thank you.
Stealing referral URLs is lowest kind of spyware/malware tactics. Topmoxie which was another for of advanced java app coming with Limewire did it.