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Why I recommend against Brave. (thelibre.news)
submitted 6 months ago by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
295 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 451 points 6 months ago

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.
[-] Khlo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 113 points 6 months ago

Librewolf users (totally not biased)

[-] voodooattack@lemmy.world 49 points 6 months ago

[-] AtariDump@lemmy.world 39 points 6 months ago

[-] PlexSheep@infosec.pub 26 points 6 months ago

Please tell me you have the whole set. I have waited for someone to post this since literally 2018

[-] AtariDump@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

I do not but now wish I did

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[-] b0o@lemm.ee 80 points 6 months ago

Thanks for the TLDR. Enough said, deleted Brave app. Firefox Focus is a good alternate.

[-] voodooattack@lemmy.world 12 points 6 months ago

I hear Vivaldi is pretty good too

[-] Cethin@lemmy.zip 12 points 6 months ago

I used Vivaldi for a while. It's still Chromium, so I would recommend against it. There's too many good Firefox options to use anything Chromium.

[-] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 35 points 6 months ago

You should also add secretly whitelisted Facebook trackers in their adblocker, something they did a while back.

​

  • Shipped a TOR feature that leaked DNS

Yikes I didn't know they did that but I'm not surprised. There's a reason the people behind Tor say it should only be used via the official Tor browser, because only the Tor browser can provide that level of protection against those kind s of leaks, as well as much better fingerprinting resistance than chromium-based brave is going to give you.

[-] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 7 points 6 months ago

Thanks for the summary.

[-] vala@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

It's so "weird" how the same kind of person who would be openly anti-LGBTQ would also make a such a sketchy product.

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this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
839 points (95.3% liked)

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