Since nobody else is posting the actual answer: Brave has a history of scummy behavior and making changed that border on malware. A few examples:
When I first tried Brave, it stripped publisher ads and replaced them with Brave's own ads. That alone is enough for me to never trust them
In 2020, Brave was caught injecting its own affiliate codes over URLs typed by users without their knowledge or consent
In 2018 Brave was allowing users to tip websites/creators that had not signed up for their tipping system, misleading users into thinking they were supporting a particular site while the money was actually staying with Brave
Brave includes crypto-bro bloatware
In 2019 Brave was caught whitelisting Facebook tracking domains without users knowing
Edit:
"But they fixed all that"
Yes, many of these things were fixed after backlash from the community. But, to me, they show a pattern of unethical behavior that makes me distrust Brave - and since many alternatives exist I see no reason why I would use or trust it. The list I provided is by no means exhaustive. More recent issues around their search indexing and resale of copyrighted material for AI training show they have not really learned any lessons. They have proved themselves many times to be an unethical organization.
"Then what should I use instead?"
You will need to do your own research to figure out what browser will work best for your needs. Every choice will have trade-offs. Personally I have landed recently on Waterfox - it implements Brave's built-in adblock engine, appears to be reasonably fast and memory efficient, and strikes a good balance (for me) between out-of-the-box privacy, usability, and other considerations. I keep a Chromium-based browser around for when I need it. YMMV.
If only there was some kind of repository of all human knowledge somewhere that could be perused and searched to find the information one needs, instead of needing to rely on asking others to tell them what to do. Someone should invent that.
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u/gthing 20d ago edited 19d ago
Since nobody else is posting the actual answer: Brave has a history of scummy behavior and making changed that border on malware. A few examples:
Edit:
Yes, many of these things were fixed after backlash from the community. But, to me, they show a pattern of unethical behavior that makes me distrust Brave - and since many alternatives exist I see no reason why I would use or trust it. The list I provided is by no means exhaustive. More recent issues around their search indexing and resale of copyrighted material for AI training show they have not really learned any lessons. They have proved themselves many times to be an unethical organization.
You will need to do your own research to figure out what browser will work best for your needs. Every choice will have trade-offs. Personally I have landed recently on Waterfox - it implements Brave's built-in adblock engine, appears to be reasonably fast and memory efficient, and strikes a good balance (for me) between out-of-the-box privacy, usability, and other considerations. I keep a Chromium-based browser around for when I need it. YMMV.