As you may have noticed, I used the word copyrighted for the title of this story. And it’s not without reason. I think this story could have been fairly decent even without the copyright part, so before we get to the nitty gritty stuff – I can 100% confirm that Brave lets you ingest copyrighted material through their Brave Search API, to which they also assign you “rights”.
Time and time again, Brave gets caught doing slimy things. Just don’t use Brave. There are far, far better and more ethical alternatives.
Bad Brave for selling your data to AI, good Chrome for … Doing that to the scale AI couldn’t comprehend. And majority of people not having any issue whatsoever with that. Maybe AI will figure this one out eventually.
I guess we are talking browsers here. Just not ones anyone would use.
I guess I have chome on my laptop (no idea why) and obviously on my chromebook (it’s arm so a decent FF install is hard (also 4gb (not that I use it anymore))).
Main desktop. FF for most thing, heavily plugined up.
Palemoon for other things nothing thrilling but just to keep seperate (alkso plugined up).
and well edge becuause it is ther and I have MS stuff so why not. Mainly used for stuff that works better on it (paid for) and things it will do better with no plugins, eg had to remortgage recently accidently used FF, was a pain with what the pluging stopped. Should have used edge.
There was more but I got distracted 😉
Bad Brave for redirecting links for other cryptocurrency exchanges to one it had financial interests in. Bad Brave for running a crypto donation scheme in the name of several notable tech journalists, youtubers, and crypto “celebrities” and pocketing all of the proceeds, before getting caught and “fixing the bug”. Bad Brave for lying about anonymizing telemetry gathered on their users to fund their ad-supported revenue stream (yep, another convenient “bug” that was only fixed when they were caught out).
This is only the latest in a long history of fraudulent and privacy-invading practices by the self-described “privacy first” browser.
Yeah, some time ago I donated all my BATs to Brave when I explicitly seit the Rewards not to donate anything
“Just don’t use Brave. There are far, far better and more ethical alternatives.”
Yeah? Name one.
That isn’t a defense of Brave. I currently use Vivaldi, as I think it’s the best of a bad lot. But it’s built on Chromium, which is far, far from ethical, and I”m just waiting to see what they do when Google finally shifts to Manifest 3 and ham strings extensions. If Vivaldi doesn’t find a way around that, I’ll probably switch to Firefox. I haven’t made an extensive study of it but from what I have seen, there are some ethical browsers. (Midori, K-Melon, Otter.) They aren’t very good. There are some good browsers. They aren’t the least bit ethical.
You are not wrong. The sad situation today is that you have to choose between browsers that work well or browser makes that behave well. It does not seem possible to find both in one offering. I use Firefox but their recent track record has not been spotless either.
I am holding out a lot of hope for Ladybird but it is still early days:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird
Vivaldi is a pretty good option if you want a Chromium based browser that’s fairly ethical. Made by some of the same people who made Opera before they got sold off and turned into a creepy ad company.
I kind of wish Apple would bring back Safari for Windows.
I do too and I mean it. Apple was accused of everything when WebKit was omnipresent but now that’s Chromium, it’s ok…. I’d like to have the features of Safari/iPadOS on Firefox desktop at least.
Let’s not forget that Brave is called that because of the homophobia of its creator…
cry harder
who’s crying? people using this crappy browser?
You’re replying to a troll, it’s better to just ignore them rather than feed their tiny egos.
Well, it’s a double-edged sword. I’m avoid Mozilla because of their woke agenda. For me Google browser monopoly is a lesser evil than wokeism. Besides, Firefox lacks hardware acceleration on Raspberry, which is important factor for my needs.
Name one useable search engine that’s more ethical than Brave. No, it’s not Duckduckgo (Bing) or Startpage (Google).
Qwant
Unfortunately, Brave is the only Chromium-derived browser on Android that has 1) sync functionalities and 2) an ad blocker.
Vivaldi?
And Opera
I use Raspberry Pi4 as my main desktop. So I need the chrome-based browser being able to sync the Raspberry Pi devices as well. The only alternative for me is Vivaldi. But their interface, while being cool is making the oveall experience much slower.
Opera is not available for ARM64/armhf Linux at all.
And why not Firefox? Firefox still (as of 115) lacks the hardware acceleration support for video playback on Raspberry.
The author (of the piece Thom links to and excerpts) seems to have substantially misunderstood what Brave is actually doing. He subsequently updated the post with a response from Brave, and although he wasn’t satisfied with its response, he nevertheless withdrew (via strikethrough) a number of his original claims about Brave, including the phrase ‘to which they also assign you “rights”’ that Thom included in his excerpt.