First of all, let me say that this is just my personal opinion.
A browser is one of the most important links in the chain when it comes to privacy and security. I consider two things when selecting a browser. Does it have the controls I need to protect myself and to what degree can I trust the people making the browser.
For me, that second point it is the issue. As for why, we can take walk through Brave’s history. I am going from memory here so I can’t warrant that this is perfect but it is in the ballpark.
The original concept behind Brave is that it would remove ads from websites and replace them with ads provided by Brave. Brave would then share the revenue from the ads with the sites. They were essentially planning to steal ad revenue from sites without permission. As you can imagine, that didn’t go over very well an they were forced to reconsider.
They then came up with plan B. They would allows people to donate crypto to sites. However, for the site to benefit, they would have to opt-in to letting Brave swap their ads out. Of course, they had a problem with this strategy. They didn’t have enough users for many site owners to be willing to share their ad revenue.
This led to plan C. Seemingly overnight they rebranded as a privacy and security focused browser with a bunch of slick marketing. Privacy and security were hot topics at the time and this allowed them to increase their user base. However, there was a small issue. At the time, they hadn’t actually implemented most of the controls they have in place today. They were just claiming to be privacy and security focused.
Since becoming a privacy marketing browser, they have had quite a few missteps, most of which the Brave fanatics write off as mistakes. However, to me, they mostly seem deliberate. I can’t remember all of them but here are a few.
- They were whitelisting certain facebook URLs. The whitelist was hard-coded into the software. When they were caught, their response was that people wanted to be able to login to facebook more easily.
- They started actively promoting sending BAT to sites that were not signed up with their service. Essentially allowing them skim all those donations back to themselves.
- They were caught inserting their own affiliate links into the URLs of Brave users
Perhaps the worst part of all of these breaches of trust is the way they reacted to them. Instead of owning their mistakes, the CEO always has a litany of reasons why what they were doing made sense.
To me that is more than enough for me to not be willing to trust them with my privacy. However, I encourage everyone to do their own research. All these issues are widely publicized and there is lots of ready information on them.
To be clear, do I think that Brave itself is stealing my information? No. Am I confident that they aren’t allowing others to do so? No.
Ultimately, it looks to me like Brave is desperate to monetize the company using whatever means necessary. I am going to be honest, I have nothing against for profit entities. However, the methods and techniques that Brave has used to do this is too underhanded for my comfort.
Now, if privacy isn’t big priority for you, than the trust issue becomes less relevant and Brave is a chromium-based browser with some out of the box privacy and security features enabled by default. However, since this is the “Which Privacy Browser?” topic. I think it is worth mentioning.