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Brave, the false sensation of privacy

ebin.city

211–220 of 501 posts

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#211

Another shady practice: you could donate to any website, but Brave itself received the amount if not claimed by the website creator. Users did not know. ( https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br... , https://redd.it/a8g1i9 ) Don't use Brave. Tell others not to use it.

Lots of people are pointing out that this isn't the case anymore, but the fact is that it used to work this way, and they only changed it after backlash. That was enough to turn me off of Brave forever.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#213
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your anger is misplaced - you should be angry at government who requires Brave (and eBay, and Etsy, and any company that is paying out money to people) to require this. If this wasn’t legally required they (and every other company) wouldn’t do it.

That, at least, does have a reason. Uphold is an online exchange and crypto wallet more popular in Europe but very similar to Coinbase. The government doesn't want money laundering and other financial crimes, and you might disagree with KYC but at least there's some argument there. I don't like that Brave doesn't say, on their Brave Rewards page, warning: You will need to give up your privacy to cash out. If that's O…

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Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#214

I find Brave Rewards very egregious. You get lots of BAT and the marketing copy hypes it up immensely without mentioning, anywhere, that you need to provide your SSN and Driver's License to a third-party (Uphold) if you actually, you know, want to cash out. This seems particularly irritating because, let's say you set your browser to show you the max amount of ads for a while. You saved up for a few months, decided y…

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Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#215
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast isn't doing anything to your DNS. They're the largest ISP in the country, there'd be a huge uproar if they were doing something like that. There are plenty of experts who are subscribers who'd be able to figure out exactly what's going on.

That couldn't be more wrong. They literally published an IETF draft standard on how they do it. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-livingood-dns-re...

That draft is referring to the operation of their own DNS servers, not messing with third-party DNS.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Vivaldi count?

If you trust the people behind Opera, sure?

I trust them personally. Jon von Tetzchner, the founder of Opera, left Opera to start Vivaldi once he felt management wasn't doing things the right way.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, uproar around prices and speeds and stuff like that. Nothing like screwing with third-party DNS requests.

Actually, I have heard that claim more than once, about various providers (up to, and including, “when I changed my DNS settings and the traffic slowed down, the tech got me to change them back, and the traffic sped up”). It's less common, I think, because more people know how to check their speed than change their DNS.

The only way I can think of that working is if the provider is intercepting DNS requests for popular speed tests to redirect to an internally-hosted version that would be faster. Otherwise, I can't think of any realistic way DNS settings can affect actual throughput.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#218

I find Brave Rewards very egregious. You get lots of BAT and the marketing copy hypes it up immensely without mentioning, anywhere, that you need to provide your SSN and Driver's License to a third-party (Uphold) if you actually, you know, want to cash out. This seems particularly irritating because, let's say you set your browser to show you the max amount of ads for a while. You saved up for a few months, decided y…

How does KYC benefit them? Seems like (if legally allowed) they would want to reduce the friction as much as possible.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That couldn't be more wrong. They literally published an IETF draft standard on how they do it. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-livingood-dns-re...

That draft is referring to the operation of their own DNS servers, not messing with third-party DNS.

"... except in reasonable and justifiable cases where a user has been placed into a so-called "walled garden" for reasons of abuse, security compromise, account non-payment, new service activation, etc."

Their own words

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#220

Another shady practice: you could donate to any website, but Brave itself received the amount if not claimed by the website creator. Users did not know. ( https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br... , https://redd.it/a8g1i9 ) Don't use Brave. Tell others not to use it.

Lots of people are pointing out that this isn't the case anymore , but the fact is that it used to work this way, and they only changed it after backlash. That was enough to turn me off of Brave forever.

Yeah, I too dislike it when companies respond positively in response to criticism.

I prefer the orgs I interact with to be perfect and never make mistakes and when they do (but they don't because I only interact with perfect institutions) I prefer them to double-down instead of improve.

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