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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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TIL; stay away from Brave.
Not only because of this article, but merely an hour ago I have read also this post (numerous links provided in the post) about the dubious Brendan Eich.
i don't get why people choose to use brave, firefox is great and if you really need that chromium base ungoogled chromium exists
Firefox has always been my go-to. In my opinion more people should use it.
Librewolf is starting to replace Firefox for me. Either way birds of a feather!
I think LW is better out of the box. It has both UBO and Containers built in. Which is just awesome. I still use FF as my daily just because I have customized it beyond belief, but if I were to start over again I think I'd start with LW.
I think Brave did some aggressive marketing, including social media posts and comments. I did buy their narrative at first too - a browser that already tuned to block ads and trackers. But later I've noticed that it constantly connects back to brave server and it looked suspicious. Firefox is the best.
Agreed, a lot of Reddit comments felt very shilly. Firefox is king and helps prevent Google dictate web standards.
Yeah, exactly. If every browser is chromium based the web will be an unhealthy monoculture. Easy for a single player to dictate standards. Haven't seen this mentioned as much, but its really important
Brave is great for less techy people because it's defaults are good enough. It's not necessary to tweak settings and install add-ons to get basic privacy. I definitely prefer Firefox, but it takes some knowledge to get it to surpass Brave's defaults.
I don't like installing add-ons. I'd rather have it baked into the browser.
Add-ons give you a lot more choice and control than baked in options.
What's stopping Brave's blocker from just allowing ads from Brave's services? Can you see under the hood to tell if it's blocking everything or just surface level stuff?
A proprietary built in blocker is only as trustworthy as the people that made it, and as the links in this discussion suggest, Brave isn't earning much trust.
you are right about choice and more control but brave's ad blocker is not proprietary here is the github link, ublock origin is still the king though
Of course, using add-ons also requires diligence, as each add-on from each source requires one to both trust the source and vet each source regularly. An add-on is also as trustworthy as the people that made it, and one must be willing to do the work the verify that those add-ons continue to be safe.
For me, Firefox is an inferior product in terms of security feature implementation
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html
Stock Firefox has very limited privacy protections.
The reason is they have proper build infrastructure managed by the Brave. With Ungoogled Chromium the binaries are produced by third parties, vary in version etc. People claim they would only use "open source software" but they do download binary versions nevertheless and don't compile that code themselves. This increases the risk of a supply chain attack, where a malicious binary is submitted and nobody has really knows until it is too late. The other issue is they disable CRLSets because of "google hate" which we think actually increases the likelihood of a MiTM attack occurring because rogue certificates are not detected and invalidated as quickly as they could have been.
This article describes a few other things https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/
Everything is a process and personally thats no excuse to not criticize the bad actions of a project like brave, but in the topic of personal opinions like those from Brandon Eich’s, i think is completely emotional the reactions of the brave users, he has awful opinions with the same sex mariage thing and covid but that does not mean the damn product/service he's part of is bad or have censorship. He better shut up and dont ruin a good project because he wants to "speak up" about his stupid rant about insane opinions that makes bad PR.
Well fuck. Thank you. Guess i need to change browsers. Any recs or is firefox best?
You can try Librewolf. It is a firefox fork with focus on privacy. You do not need to go through many settings when setting it up, as you need to do with firefox standalone.
Ungoogled Chromium is my current favourite
Previously was using Firefox Developer’s edition which is also decent. But I like a minimalist browser that acts more like a framework to which I can just add what I want, and doesn’t come with a lot of bullshit I don’t need.
The reason we don't recommend Ungoogled Chromium and instead recommend Brave on the privacyguides.org website is because they have proper build infrastructure managed by the Brave. With Ungoogled Chromium the binaries are produced by third parties, vary in version etc. People claim they would only use "open source software" but they do download binary versions nevertheless and don't compile that code themselves. This increases the risk of a supply chain attack, where a malicious binary is submitted and nobody has really knows until it is too late. The other issue is they disable CRLSets because of "google hate" which we think actually increases the likelihood of a MiTM attack occurring because rogue certificates are not detected and invalidated as quickly as they could have been.
This article describes a few other things https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/