this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Privacy

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Please, do not use Brave. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by eya@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.

Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.

Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.

After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL's. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.

Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I'd say the answer is a very clear no.

One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.

Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don't mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.

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[–] gornius@lemmy.world 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Brave behaving like Win XP era browser with gazillion toolbars installed, with a pinch of crypto and crypto promoting ads should be a giant red flag.

FOSS =/= trusted by default. Why are there so many FOSS evangelists, but such a damn tiny part of them are programmers, let alone programmers able to examine a source code behind such a giant codebase as web browser?

I use Vivaldi, at least their business model is clear, and developer is kind of trusted, and not crypto scammer and homophobe.

[–] aaathats3as@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 year ago

Vivaldi is closed source and another chromium fork

So it's trash by default

[–] RandyButternubs@lemmy.nz 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

vivaldi probably does have spyware it lol. why would you choose an application that hides their code instead of making it open for everybody to see / improove? you dont need to be a programmer to know that any FOSS app with a following would get caught out instantly for pulling anything lame. Eg chromium prototyping web integrity api. you dont need to audit the code, just the fact that it is open makes it 99% more trustworthy as people are looking at the code all the time.

[–] Fjor@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Vivaldi is Source Available :

https://vivaldi.com/source/

[–] RandyButternubs@lemmy.nz 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

from vivialdi website: Roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open source coming from Chromium, 3% is open source coming from us, leaves only 5% for our UI closed-source

still way more sus than brave

source: https://vivaldi.com/blog/technology/why-isnt-vivaldi-browser-open-source/

[–] gornius@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

  1. Chromium has tons of eyes on it, because it's codebase for many other projects, such as Electron and any chromium based browser.

  2. Web integrity wasn't discovered through chromium source code, but it was openly proposed by Google on separate Github repo, dedicated solely for that proposal.

  3. There are many shortcuts in your thinking that just the code being open makes it trustworthy. Every PowerShell malware technically has its code open, because it's a script. But you wouldn't open a random script from the internet, without checking what it does, yet you don't apply the same logic to Brave. If you don't check the source code yourself, you either need to trust an author, or third parties that "checked" the code.

  4. In addition to that, you're probably using compiled binary, which means at this point you can throw that source code out from window, because at this point you can't be sure compiled binary == source code.

  5. Due to the enormous amount of code, it's really easy to obfuscate malicious behavior. At the scale of the browser it's more efficient tracking outbound packets that program sends than examine source code.

[–] RandyButternubs@lemmy.nz 1 points 1 year ago

i really dont think the large amount of code thing is a good argument because of the way github works. any changes made are highlighted and you can look back at the history of changes. even if this theoretical spyware was implimented from the beginning people would know.

yeah I downloaded it from github and doubt its got spyware in it so i trust i dont need to compile it myself.

ppl are just hating coz they dont like some guy that has somthing to do with brave & all this brave is spyware stuff is based off of nothing.

vivaldi has closed source code that is completely trust me bro not spyware 🤣