Every single one of these Brave “scandals” are so irrelevant and meaningless. I was hoping the reddit hive mind wouldn’t be brought over to lemmy, but here we are.
This article, especially after the update from Brave, seems like a huge nothing-burger. Just another excuse for the Firefox Fanatics crowd to rag on Brave and circlejerk each other about how good Firefox is.
The article isn’t even about Brave Browser, and it has nothing to do with user data. The website owner is mad that Brave Search is crawling their site and using data in their “Summarizer” feature. I thought Firefox users were supposed to be against the Google internet monopoly, but apparently when it comes to one of the only companies with their own independent and actually decent search engine, they don’t seem to care anymore because of stupid “Firefox good brave bad” browser wars nonsense.
complains about browser wars
types up multiple paragraphs crying about “Firefox Fanatics”
Did nobody read the article? The author is crying that Brave implemented a summary feature so users don’t have to read through entire paragraphs to get to the actual content. Of course, he goes on and on about copyright and OpenAI, nothing really about user data.
I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.
I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.
(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)
Not that Mozilla has been 100% great either. Remember the Mr. Robot debacle?
If not: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
One of the founders, Brendan Eich, donated his money to take away the equal right for same-sex couples to marry in California (Prop 8). He never acknowledge that it was mistake, so I can only assume that he truly wants to see the marriages of same-sex couples erased, which is quite a hateful thing to desire.
i dont agree with it but he can do whatever he wants with his money. not sure it is relevant to internet privacy tho.
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This slime funded efforts to revoke another human’s civil rights. That is not opinion.
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Loving v. Virginia (1967) and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) ruled that interracial and same sex marriage bans violate the equal protections and due process clauses of the 14th amendment.
Why is everyone mixing search engines and browsers here? This is specifically about the search engine and the problems that api of the search engine has with respecting copyright laws. I use their search engine and dont use their browser
Firefox forever.
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Brave is just too shady and I hate that it’s considered a “privacy” browser by people who don’t know better.
I found the juxtaposition of your comment to the one below yours to be pretty funny.
Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don’t understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.
Firefox is GOAT, but I do have Brave installed on my phone specifically for playing YouTube. The Brave browser automatically blocks YouTube ads, allows me to play videos in windowed mode, and allows me to play videos with the screen off.
I don’t do anything else in Brave, so I’ll probably hang onto it as basically a YouTube app.
You might want to look into NewPipe then. Lets you do all those things with YT, plus you can also download the videos or their audio only
I’m on an iPhone, which I why I don’t use all the other things Android people suggest.
Brave has been about the only thing I’ve found that works and is easy for iPhone.
I still remember why: Mozilla fired Brendan Eich, the man who would go on to found Brave, for donating to Christian charities in the politically polarised climate of 2016. After Eich went, they also quietly purged any other employees that showed even a hint of conservative sympathies in their internet presence. They then went on to “experiment” with pushing browser ads on users, and while they eventually ended the experiment because of massive user backlash, they still made no apologies and didn’t abandon the idea. Just made a final public response dripping with PR bullshit with a patronising conclusion along the lines of “internet users just aren’t ready for this change yet”.
Brandon Eich was fired because he was constantly giving money to politicians and groups that were advocating for the banning of same sex marriage. Also funding the campaign of congressman Tom McClintock, a certified piece of shit, Who denies climate change, is against LGBTQ rights, and was among the republicans trying to overturn the 2020 election.
So he was fired for his political affiliation.
From an outside perspective, I find it astonishing that those ideas are considered acceptable political positions in the US. With that said, I believe in individuals having the right to support or promote their chosen cause, but also the right of others to choose whether or not they wish to associate with them.
Opposition to gay marriage was fairly common in the early and mid 2010s. It was only legalised 8 years ago in the US, and so, in 2016, it was still a live issue.
Yeah, it just feels so bizarre to me as someone who isn’t American.
LOL, about half the points in the article are struck through now. Yet another “journalist” who doesn’t understand how anything works getting angry how they way they imagine it works.
That’s some quality reporting “stackdiary”.
Lol, I’m glad he at least included the full email response from them. You can tell he’s a little salty and still misinterpreting things when you read about how he took their response to the Search Crawler part.
I’m too stupid to get any of this so… Can I continue using Brave or should I look for alternatives?
This article shouldn’t affect Brave users themselves.
The content of the article deals with issues that only website owners/publishers have to be salty about. Much of what’s left comes down to the legal grey area of how to treat LLMs like ChatGPT and whether they’re allowed to scrape websites for training data or not.
Never liked Brave and never will. It is so overhyped by everyone because they are too damm lazy to configure Firefox or Ungoogled Chromium for Privacy and want to trust a shady company with “privacy by default”
I use it as my main browser and I honestly can’t go back to Firefox, but I really dislike some parts of it and of it’s community. The browser itself is fast, its default ad-blocker is awesome and there are a couple functionnalities that are nice to see, like Tor integration. But they block ads to show you their ads instead, that you cannot block even if you deactivate the “Brave Rewards”. The whole reward system in BAT is kind of shady; they need to authenticate you before you can withdraw anything and it’s worth peanuts anyway. When I complained about those issues on reddit, I got answers that looked like they were produced by sect members, and it wasn’t even on a related sub.
Brave ads are opt-in.
At some point you opted-in.
If you don’t like it, then next time opt-out now or don’t opt-in next time.
I opted out and I still see ads. That’s the problem.
It’s a shame that there isn’t a good alternative for Apple devices, though. iOS doesn’t have much by the way of good ad blockers.
It’s a shame that
there isn’t a good alternative for Apple devices, though. iOS doesn’t have much by the way of good ad blockersApple infringes on your property rights by refusing to relinquish control of your device to you, the owner, even after they “sold” it to you.FTFY.
It’s the hype from Cryptobros pushing it because it has crypto functionally and its own shitcoin.
Personally, I never liked how it wants to monetize your browsing time constantly and pushes a lot of crypto shit in its advertising. Vivaldi is much better as an alternative imo.
vivaldi’s UI is overbloated though tbh
It’s as bloated as you want it. Everything’s customisable.
What are your setting os Firefox? What do you recomend?
The Containers extension is the only thing you really need IMO. Firefox is already very privacy focused, and its default settings are pretty good.
With First Party Isolation is place, containers now add up very little to your privacy to be honest. They are mostly helpful in convenient compartmentalization of your browsing activities without actually having two different browsers.
Firefox is already very privacy focused, and its default settings are pretty good.
Partially incorrect. There is unnecessary telemetry that you would prefer to get rid of, for an example there is a setting for extensions recommendation as you browse. Also, probably because of their deal with Google, Firefox defaults to Google’s location services even though Mozilla has its own. You may want to change that as well for better privacy. I am only citing a handful few examples, there is more for you to dig in. uBO is a must have with right set of filters enabled according to your own privacy threat vectors. There is a reason hardening is a common practice among Firefox users.
That’s why i use Firefox.
I had been pretty happy to find brave search as an alternative search engine, but this is kinda making me rethink using their products… :(
It’d be cool if someone could build an open source extension for Firefox that takes their idea of using browsers as a distributed crawler, but while making it clear that a website is being crawled and not selling the data for AI training, but honestly thats just me daydreaming. I’d love an open and private search engine that isn’t just a meta search :(
Edit:
Mojeek is UK based, open and private and actually have their own index, they aren’t just a meta search, but they dont have much in the way of any kind of summary or highlighted answers if you’re looking more for an answer to a question than the list of websites
Yep doesn’t come up as much when people mention privacy, but makes decent privacy claims, and aims to build a more fairly monetized search engine by giving 90% of money from ads to content creators (no idea how that will eventually work, but its a compelling concept)
Quant seems to have decent results from my initial couple searches, but like mojeek doesn’t seem have any kind of summary or answers function.
I think I’ll give all three a try each time I have a difficult search task and see if any of them might be worth switching to. Right now I often have to switch over to google even from brave when I’m having a hard time finding something.
I switched to Duck Duck Go and Firefox and have never looked back.
Brave always seemed kinda scummy to me, like they’re robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Unfortunately, DuckDuckGo is just Bing with additional privacy these days. Effectively is is what Startpage is for Google.
Brave Search is one of the only independent search indexes available these days. Others include Mojeek and Qwant, but neither are as good as Brave Search.
I’ve been using Brave for over a year now and really like it. Nearly all the functionality of Chrome with none of the privacy issues.
You should consider switching to firefox. Brave will be affected by the elimination of Manifest V2, essentially killing privacy on chromium browsers (ubo doesnt work as well, privacy badger is useless, etc). An extremely easy way to switch to firefox without the hassle of configuring it be to private is to download the “Librewolf” fork - comes configured at stock with 99% of the privacy features firefox has.
How does one do this? What is a fork? Is it an extension or different app altogether? Sorry, new to the privacy game.
Can anyone recommend a good alternative that works well under Linux and block ads and trackers well? In particular YouTube ads?
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I tried Brave for a couple days but I kept getting notifications from it that were ads. Brave had to go.
You can turn these off. It’s part of their crypto rewards system (you get occasional ads, some crypto and then some of it gets distributed back to the websites you vist most, or just the ones you select) so it’s on by default. But you can easily opt out of this from settings.
I don’t think this whole crypto system lifted off really, but it was a neat idea to reward web content creators and users, according to traffic and preferences.
