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Brave, the false sensation of privacy

ebin.city

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Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#21

Post by mrweasel »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #3
auslegung wrote: post #2

I’ve been using Brave to watch YouTube videos in incognito mode ever since 1Blocker on Safari stopped blocking YouTube ads. This article brings up some good points, and I want to support Firefox more anyway, so I need to see how Firefox handles YouTube ads.

For the past month or so, Brave on Ubuntu has been failing to block YT ads, so now I've been stuck with 2 unskippable multi-minute ads before almost every vid. I've been hitting mute and switching tabs while I wait. The most egregiously annoying one was 6 minutes of ads on an 8-minute standup comedy clip. Brave on mobile still blocks all that crap so I've transitioned to listening to YT content on my cellphone, propp…

You could pay for ad-free YouTube, if you dislike the ads so much.

Many argue that "They'll pay to have ads removed", but that doesn't seem to hold true when services offers that exact option.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#22

Post by tgv »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #12
auslegung wrote: post #2

I’ve been using Brave to watch YouTube videos in incognito mode ever since 1Blocker on Safari stopped blocking YouTube ads. This article brings up some good points, and I want to support Firefox more anyway, so I need to see how Firefox handles YouTube ads.

I use ublock origin on Firefox and it seems to properly block all YouTube ads. As with YouTube-dl it’s probably a bit of an arms race, so if your tool of choice stops working maybe wait for the next update and they’re likely to get it fixed / right.

I guess the number of users must be low. Otherwise, there's a near perfect solution for YouTube: create a stream that contains both the ads and the content and don't allow buffering ahead of time while the ads play. Sure, that's fair task, but doable. When the costs of uBlock exceeds the server+man power needed to implement that, they'll switch.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#23

Post by bruce343434 »

> brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com fetches 5 extensions and installs them. It is said that this might be a backdoor. But I don’t want to get conspiracist. I prefer giving you verifiable facts. I’ll limit myself to inform you about suspicious activities.

Okay, so which 5 extensions? There has to be more information on this somewhere. Article seems kind of lazy and definitely loses steam after the second half.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#24

Post by gjsman-1000 »

seibelj wrote: post #20
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #11

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…

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 OK with you, great; if not, don't set your browser to show ads for months before you try cashing out or you'll get a nasty surprise.

From Brave's perspective, there's also a conflict of interest here. Remember, when an advertiser spends BAT to show an ad, 30% goes to Brave and 70% to the ad receiver. Brave has every incentive to get that 30%, don't they? If that means you were fooled into leaving your browser showing ads thinking you could cash out without losing your privacy, they benefit. And that's why it really smells fishy that they don't mention it on their product page.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#26

Post by roenxi »

The people arguing that Firefox has an edge because it maintains a separate browser engine (like the writer of this article) are going to have real difficulties making their argument. Ditto the attacks on Brave for not being private enough. The people who care about privacy should be more worried about getting caught in Google's web of properties than about privacy per-se - that company is bad news. And Firefox is more closely aligned with Google's interest than Brave is. Look at how much money Google has been funnelling to Firefox over the years.

Having a different engine is really more of an inconvenience than a strength - it means that sometimes pages will not work in Firefox. Having an independent engine was important when it was IE6 vs the open web. It doesn't matter much when the engines involved are BSD license vs GPL.

If Chrome was all proprietary licenses then having an independent engine would matter. But the internet likes to standardise on one, open, technology.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#28

Post by figers »

k33l0r wrote: post #17
tapoxi wrote: post #13

I don't like the crypto nonsense of Brave, and while I like Firefox in theory, its performance leaves a lot to be desired and they don't seem to know who their user base is. Microsoft Edge got a decent native vertical tab solution before Firefox did! Edge! I wish some nonprofit would make a Chromium browser with sane defaults and take my donations. That's all I need.

I tried out Edge for about 15 minutes but had to bail because of the amount of Bing and MSN nonsense embedded in the browser…

Where do you see that? I use it every day and step one was switching search to DuckDuckGo

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#29

Post by okdjnfweonfe »

Brave's development team's responses can be found at these locations, covering a post very similar to this one.

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/nvz9tl/_/h1...

https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/nw7et2/_/h18...

https://old.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/nw7et2/_/h1f...

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#30

Post by timvisee »

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.

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