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Degoogle Progress
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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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DeGoogle Yourself
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Here's a brief synopsis of the various things Brave has gotten up to, with receipts rather than "Brave is spyware": https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/.
Personally, I see a pattern of continually engaging in underhanded and rent-seeking behavior that does not align with its stated goal of ensuring user privacy. Because I see a pattern of trying things to see what they can get away with, I lack any trust in their future behavior and have no desire to use software that I feel I have to maintain constant vigilance over what changes they're making from release to release.
I totally get your point about not wanting to use Brave for ethical and moral reasons, but considering I haven't seen any issues lately regarding a lack of privacy or honesty from the devs, I'm actually really comfortable where I'm at.
It's not just about moral reasons (although I would write them off for moral reasons alone, to be clear). Brave as a browser has a history of making privacy worse- see, for example, disabling advance anti-fingerprinting in 2024 and their piss-poor tor implementation in 2021. Your initial comment had said you hadn't seen anything since 2018 and maybe you like the browser enough to not care about their history of careless implementations of privacy features or their limiting of user choice on fingerprinting protections, but I don't see how these objections can be dismissed as not relating to privacy.
They really do involve privacy, just like how Brave used Google as its default search engine when it was first created, but that changed over time, just as the things you mentioned are from 2018 and 2024 (8 and 2 years ago).
So let me get this straight: you are concerned about Google's overreach into your privacy rights, but you are defending Brave browser, who has a history of deceiving users with claims of privacy, literally trying to mine shitcoins on your device, and promoting ads for certain affiliates without telling anyone?
Either you are a paid troll or incredibly naive.
List which privacy promises Brave has failed to keep.
This isn't even a complete list. Are you starting to see why Brave and deGoogle don't go together yet?
I'm assuming this is a list you copied from somewhere else, most of these are not privacy issues.
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/13527
There is a more recent issue where DNS is leaking if your Shield settings are set to "Aggressive" for trackers & ads blocking:
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/48947
1,2,3,4,6,7,8,10,11 are not privacy related issues.
I don't think you read, or understood the article, because your summary is not what's happening there. In that article a website owner is complaining that Brave is scraping their website and using the content to feed some database for LLM training.
I was confused about because your summary is incorrect (again). Brave does still block fingerprinting, but according to that article they removed the "strict" level blocking because too many sites broke.
Interesting that you didn't respond to the other points. Anyway, I don't give a shit what people do on their devices, ultimately. Brave has shown itself to not be a trustworthy player many times, yet you folks still just drink the koolaid. I have no idea why Brave's marketing gets you every time when the reality is they are out to make profit at the expense of the user.
It's not that interesting, I just pointed out that they don't have much to do with what the other user was asking for. They can respond to those other points if they want to.
For a recap, you mentioned:
The other user asked you to:
You responded with a list of 11 items. Only 3 were initially privacy related. 2 of those 3 you changed the headline to make a false claim. 1 of those turned out to not even be a privacy issue (after actually reading the source).
If you want to convince Brave users to not use Brave, you'll want to make sure that your arguments are valid and that you've actually read and understood the sources you're pointing to.
I even provided you with a current/active DNS leak issue that you can use.
Right, I'll take correction on any inaccuracies, and I should read more attentively.
Let's set aside privacy as a premise.
I'm trying to understand why Brave, who for the last 10 years has been caught time and time again in "oops, we forgot to tell you" moments is so popular with many folks seeking alternatives to chrome and ff. And some of these admissions by Brave are pretty serious, too.
Is it the marketing?
Well, you have to remember that we are in an echo chamber here in the Fediverse.
I think the easiest way to explain this is with an example that might put you in their shoes for a bit. Ask yourself this, what would it take for someone to convince you to switch from using Lemmy to using something else like Mbin/PieFed? Where is the line you draw on what the developers say or do that would cause you to make that change? (Rhetorical questions).
Everyone has different values and different lines that can be crossed. For some, if the developers even hinted at support for a particular belief, they would immediately drop the software and find something else. For others, they might disagree with the developer's opinions/actions but since they're using Lemmy.World, they're not directly supporting the developers anyway, so they'll continue using Lemmy as long as it's not under the dev's instance. And then there are others who will somewhat or even strongly agree with the dev's opinions/actions.
I would argue that only a small minority of users would fall under the category that would completely drop using Lemmy. At that point, the only factor that most others really care about (for switching) might be for better features or ease of use. So, unless the devs did or said something far worse to the point that it crosses the line for most users, bringing up the same points isn't going to change the mind of most users.
Now apply this to browsers. The vast majority of people will prefer features/convenience/familiarity over the opinions/actions of one developer vs another developer as long as certain lines aren't crossed (again, what that line is will be different for everyone).
Some users will be in the camp that, if any software even touches LLMs, Crypto, etc. then they won't use the software. They hold those values as high as they do privacy/security which is why they would use something like LibreWolf instead of Brave.
Most users would probably not have strong enough opinions one way or another on Crypto, LLMs, etc. (the other concerns you raised) to let that factor too much into their final decision.
Even for the ones who disagree with it, as long as those options are disabled by default, easy to disable, or as long as they aren't directly supporting them, then this would still factor lower on their final decision for which software to use.
Marketing definitely plays a big part. Doing a quick search for "compare privacy related browsers" leads to a bunch of articles that usually rank Brave very high. Additionally, the vast majority of users are going to stick with something that's familiar to them and already has the features they're used to.
Privacy reasons aside, most people are going to stick with what's familiar to them, and the vast majority of users are already using some sort of Chromium browser.
My apologies for the wall of text, I found your comment interesting. Most of this I'm sure you already know. I just wanted to explore the subject a bit more, so I got my thoughts out.