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> A company has to make money to survive and pay its employees. So why do they give their product away for free? To lure naive/optimistic people in so they can be exploited later? Why should a company like that survive?
Yeah sure, rant more on Brave, and stay silent about Google.
Everything free, becomes ad-infested. Nothing is free, and it's really annoying seeing company after company make empty promises about privacy and "being different", then switching up when their investors start breathing down their necks. Just be honest from the start.
Craigslist has done a pretty good job resisting this.
Craigslist has indeed done very, very well. They've maintained a useful service, ad-free, for decades. Made a ton of money doing it, too.
What's the idea here? I was under the impression that one of the selling points of Brave is that you don't get ads when browsing. Doesn't this go against that?
Brave has never tried to be ad free. Instead the goal is to encourage less intrusive and more benign ads.
Especially with Manifest v3 looming which would kill modern ad blockers, I see no reason not to use Firefox. Sure, Brave and other Chromium browsers might say they'll fork Chromium, but how long will that last, really? It's no joke to maintain a fork.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers...
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Some users — possibly Brave's core target audience — might complain that there's no way to remain anonymous in this flow: either you allow Brave to leak your info to advertisers, or you allow Brave to leak your info to Stripe in the payment flow. There's (currently) no way to pay for a Brave Premium account with crypto or through any other anonymous mechanism.
> either you allow Brave to leak your info to advertisers Can you expand on this? According to the article the ads are privacy-preserving but I'm open to hearing otherwise. There's not a lot of detail in the article.
My question to somebody who understands this more than me, by collecting query, country, device type, is that enough info to identify users?
Doesn't Brave automatically get User Agent strings, too?
Ads seem to be a modern virus that infects everything. Everyone who claims "no ads", eventually turns their back on that once they get big enough, even companies with more than enough money from their own products (e.g. Apple, Netflix). I've never seen anything so powerful. I guess it comes down to "no business would say no to free money", but it really is incredible.
Not the biggest fan of Brave myself, but they seem to actually get extra points in my eyes for adding the paid option. It's not like you can pay $3 to Google to get them to stop surveilling you. On a bigger note, monetizing search without ads seem to be a pretty tricky business model. Especially if you want to move beyond being a niche product; even an average HN reader would be hard to convince to pay for a regular…
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> either you allow Brave to leak your info to advertisers Can you expand on this? According to the article the ads are privacy-preserving but I'm open to hearing otherwise. There's not a lot of detail in the article.
Assuming we can trust Brave, the article clearly states: "Brave Search only uses your search query, country, and device type to show you ads, and does not keep any kind of profile of your searches." My question to somebody who understands this more than me, by collecting query, country, device type, is that enough info to identify users? Doesn't Brave automatically get User Agent strings, too?
I've rarely seen a product become so bad so quickly. Brave started out with great promises and has consistently under-delivered since.
Looking around the codebase, it's filled with eyebrow-raising things like direct integration with specific crypto exchanges. Heck, it still has a whole automatic affiliate fraud feature present in the code, but disabled by default.
The truth is, the mission statement is not commercially viable, because it was always trivially achievable as a non-profit project.