From Wiki:

Brave Software was founded in 2015 by Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and former Mozilla CEO who left the organization after coming under fire for his support of eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry [...]

and

In August 2016, the company had received at least US$7 million in angel investments from venture capital firms, including Peter Thiel's Founders Fund [...]

Should tell you everything you need to know.

I'd say being 'privacy focused' is just a stick to get non-tech savy/gullible people that want to protect their privacy to use it, without thinking about it twice. Personally, I believe there is 0% chance they don't sell (or simply give) all data they can to Peter Thiel and Palantir.

Brave is like the ExpressVPN of browsers

Try to disable telemetry.

Haha

I tend to recommend Brave for the ones who aren't technically savvy. For that, its good.

For me who is really into privacy, I've always felt uncomfortable with brave or any chrome based browser. So I go with TOR and LibreWolf

Any decent person wouldn't use brave.

https://www.christiantoday.com.au/news/former-mozilla-ceo-ousted-for-opposing-gay-marriage-makes-comeback-with-new-internet-browser-brave.html this is who you're supporting.

What browser should I use on mobile? I use Librewolf on desktop since it runs fine, and the vertical tabs are great, and it looks nice.

On mobile though there's a lot of problems with the browser space:

• Chrome: runs great but is obviously not good for privacy
• Firefox: what most people recommend, but it has terrible performance, looks not great, and doesn't even have more than basic fingerprinting protection, and literally includes ads by default. It's also less secure on Android because they don't do per site process isolation, and the memory allocator is worse.
• Brave: people tend to dislike brave here, but it runs well (since it's chromium based) and has at least better fingerprinting protection.

What other options are there?

You can stop it in settings just like any other browser. I still will use Brave as my choice of browsers.

the crypto browser? it's not private and never was

Why I recommend against Brave - Luca Bramè.

This article is a pretty good breakdown of why you shouldn't use Brave.

That's the lie they try to sell you.

I swear Brave ran a very successful guerrilla marketing campaign and it succeeded on Reddit. If you so much as question it or suggest an alternative, you get dogpiled on by Brave bros. I don't trust it one bit. I'll stick to FF and its forks.

Just use Firefox for gods sakes, Brave is a complete joke of a browser especially when it comes to privacy.

Brave (the company) has a long history of doing dodgy stuff. They are just trying to do what Google did (directing clicks to their own shit), but they're using privacy as their marketing spiel.

Not so much no

Brave is a scam.

no, brave is just another crypto scam

No. At least not in the way most people expect.

It does block some tracking and ads that Chrome alone allows or explicitly adds. But it simply shifts that tracking to Brave. The idea was that you'd still get the benefits of that tracking by giving all of your data to Brave instead. I honestly never was convinced by this considering your data is still being sold, just by a different company so it doesn't sound much better to me. Supposedly, according to them, Brave is more trustworthy and gives you more control over what they track and sell, but I don't trust that business model. There's no real incentive for them to do what they said they would.