There is enough history of questionable business practices for me. There are more but here are some off the top of my head.
- They started their browser on the premise of blocking ads on sites and replacing them with their own ads. The concept was completely shady from the beginning.
- When that concept failed completely, they suddenly became a privacy focused browser. While changing business strategies is a pretty reasonable thing to do, it quickly became clear that their promise of respecting privacy was mostly marketing.
- They got caught whitelisting facebook URLs
- In the last couple of weeks they got caught injecting their referral links into URLs
If you search around, there is more stuff to find in their history.
If you are going to bill yourself as a privacy focused browser, you need to be trustworthy because the browser holds the keys to the kingdom when it comes to privacy. They have a track record which does not inspire any trust in me.
If they were advertising themselves as a normal browser, the things they do would still be questionable but no worse than what other companies do. But that isn’t what they advertise themselves as.
Ultimately, if privacy isn’t a priority for you, I am sure it is a fine browser. However, if you are using Brave because you are bought into the privacy hype they have created, you are probably being mislead.