Brave has a long way to go to build real trust. Too many reckless stuff: hijacking links, suspicious url-rewriting, crypto-token stunts, forgetting to communicate with users about serious privacy leaks with their faulty TOR window... also it looks like they care about privacy only in their PR brochures.
On one browser installation I stopped getting payouts, reached out to them via reddit (like they asked for) and provided all the information they asked for: ghosted.
I'm also a publisher, for weeks now I can't login and it seems like I'm not getting payouts anymore either. Never got any mail about it. Sent them an email about it February 23rd, no answer so far.
If I'd have to guess, the one client somehow got blacklisted maybe because I used too many Brave installations and they think they're fraudulent? (Though I only used like 5, Brave & Brave Beta each on a desktop & laptop, then on another desktop just one installation. Also, I still get payouts for the other installations.) Or it's just another one of the bugs that eats payouts and users' BATs.
Publisher account I even have less of an idea, it's totally fine, teen-rated gaming websites with a couple of thousand organic (search traffic) uniques/month. I did sent BAT from my unconnected Browsers (you only can connect a maximum of 4 browsers to a wallet, ever) to my site to tip myself.
As far as I know that isn't against the TOS either (even makes them more money because they douple dip).
But, even if they don't suspend you without any notice, it's completely non-transparent as a publisher too.
You get zero statistics, just a bundled payout each month. I'd never use them like this as a publisher for bigger sites, pretty sure I mailed them about that too in the past and also did not get any reply.
Their point is not that there is an adblock counter, but that brave injects ads on their own homepage to inflate the apparent usefulness of their browser. It's similar to labeling a casino a buffet and saying you don't need to gamble.
I guess some just want everything for free. It's not like they're hiding it. It's right in front of your face. It's just some are too lazy to turn it off or simply don't care.
That's a feature, not a bug. The point of the Brave ad blocker is to (optionally) replace unethical ads with ethical ones so you can compensate the content creators you browse. How is this scummy?
Because it removes a revenue stream for many sites and small businesses (oftentimes the most important or only revenue stream) and replaces it with a setup where Brave happily benefits from holding that income in escrow until you can convince them to hand over whatever percent they think is fair to share... in their crypto. That is, of course, assuming they don't ghost you, which seems like a common complaint among publishers.
The company's got a long list of shady practices and "mistakes" where they haven't paid creators and/or screwed over users for their own profits. Even if you give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they just constantly make honest mistakes, no other browser dominates the news every other month with so many privacy scandals.
While it is sort of a hostage situation (websites must sign up for Brave rewards to get a payout), would you rather websites get no revenue at all? If the prevailing mentality of most web users is to install their adblocker of choice, I see Brave as an approach that tries to cater to everyone.
> If the prevailing mentality of most web users is to install their adblocker of choice
This is not the prevailing mentality of "most" web users, in fact it's not even possible for it to be because the most common user agent is Chrome on Android.
Brave is an attempt to funnel as many oblivious users as possible into a pipeline where native ads are automatically blocked, for the precise purpose of being able to execute the "hostage situation" that you mention. The premise that the target market for Brave is the tiny group of people who are willing to look at one kind of ad (provided by Brave) but not a different kind of ad (provided by the publisher) so that the publisher can get a fraction of what they would have received from the native ad (if they opt into a crypto scam) is laughable. Most people who want to block ads just want to block all ads.
Brave Ads are opt-in and will remain so. You seem to be ignoring our brand promise, which if we violate it, lead users will roast us to a crisp. Also, consent is required under new privacy laws. If you don't want to use the opt-in revenue models in Brave, and just free-ride using best-in-class tracking protection, feel free. That's the baseline default.
I'm sure you've defined "Brave Ads" such that this is technically true, but calling your approach to ads "opt-in" is terribly misleading. Last time I opened Brave, I was immediately greeted by a full page ad on the new tab page. [1] To be clear, I have never opted in to seeing any ads in Brave.
If you haven't been roasted by your users over this, I suppose that's informative about who the users are.
The Brave FAQ also says
> Are all ads blocked or can users allow some or all? Tracking scripts (trackers) and ads that depend on them are blocked by default.
So this implies that Brave does not even block all ads by default now? If you go back to 2019 [2] the same line in the FAQ says "Ads and trackers are blocked by default".
Sponsored images are tracker-free. We had SpaceX images in the New Tab Page (NTP) without getting paid, and supporters suggested we do more and charge. If you don't like these images, turn them off ("Customize" controls on lower right). That our users mostly like these images means not only that they didn't roast us, but that we got some revenue to keep alive and keep going. This is a win in our book, but I realize not everyone agrees.
Our early website writers oversimplified. We didn't block ads so much as tracking, so the text changed. But then the code evolved, and now we block both using the same lists as uBO, only with aggressive shields required to block first-party ads that don't have tracking or whose tracking we nullify. This requires more nuance to describe. I'll get someone to work on the website docs, but the ground truth is what the browser does. If you set your global shields to aggressive and see an ad, please file a bug or DM me on Twitter and we'll work to fix it. Thanks.
I'll admit that if the GP holds the opinion that all ad blockers are "scummy" then I wouldn't be bothered. But considering I never see ublock origin get criticism here I have to assume that when most people criticize Brave's business model, they don't actually care about the publishers.
The Tor leak was already fixed in Brave Nightly when independently discovered. We were fixing as part of a HackerOne bug report, which per standard practice is not disclosed until patched in all releases. The mistake there was not forgetting to disclose, it was not airlifting the fix into Brave Stable and intermediate releases right away. We have already made process fixes; automated network leak testing is the biggest one.
If you don't like crypto-tokens, don't use them. They're optional in Brave. They have no privacy impact.
Cliqz’s Human Web used servers from FoxyProxy to remove IP address info. Will you continue to partner with FoxyProxy (as a matter of outsourcing the “trust us, we’re not tracking your IP”) component? If not FoxyProxy, then who — this 3rd party companies’ reputation matters.
We've used Fastly in the past to drop IP, implemented using VCL. I believe we're using other vendors now as well. Unlikely to use FoxyProxy but the idea is the same. We don't log IPs and don't let them get to us or to Google or other service providers, where possible.
If you are interested, https://brave.com/brave-private-cdn/ describes how we go to even more effort to avoid seeing fingerprints as well as identifiers including IP addresses.
Agreed. I just don’t see why I should not continue to use Firefox, Multi-Account Containers, and DuckDuckGo, and just use Tor Browser if I want to use TOR.
The whole crypto thing in Brave especially rubs me the wrong way, it feels like a Ponzi scheme.
It’s chrome with extra features, and not owned by Google. You don’t have to participate in their crypto nonsense, and you don’t have to use their TOR browser
All browsers allow those social widgets by default, because blocking them breaks too many pages. Brave is not alone in this regard. We're working on a better default that blocks but replaces with mock objects bundled with Brave's binary that activate the real widget on click. In the mean time, you can turn them off and risk broken pages via "Social media blocking" settings.
Also doesn't help that Brave's CEO is a right wing guy (asked to leave Mozilla because of his radical comments) and a COVID conspiracy theorist "masks don't do anything"
I'm not sure what the relevance of it either way. Even though he left Mozilla due to his public opposition to marriage-equality for same-sex couples, to connect that with his current company seems like a stretch.
And even being an anti-masker in the COVID19 context, however misguided that might be, isn't really related to the browser's functionality.
>I'm not sure what the relevance of it either way.
The subject of this sub-thread discussion is that it's about "Brave has a long way to go to build real trust." and so it's not limited to functionality, it's about trust. Therefore a leader who is seen to be "misguided" in some parts is relevant to trust in the project they lead.
I agree it's not relevant to functionality but this sub-thread is about trust which is more of softer issue.
I can understand that. But while I disagree fundamentally with the Brave CEO's political stances on the aforementioned topics, I just don't see a strong connection between those and his product, which is politically neutral from a left/right perspective.
It's nothing like, for example, the clear connections between the political views of the execs/funders of Parler and Gab and their their products.
I agree, there are certainly heaps of odious people who have created great things in technology. And I don't even mind using these things if the creator is not making money off of them. (There's an open source project whose author says, on the project's webpage, that he dislikes the idea of anyone who doesn't embrace white nationalism using the software. I don't think he was joking.)
I suppose I'm reading JacobSuperslav's comment differently than you. You're reading them as saying (in response to a comment listing reasons not to trust Brave) "here are some additional reasons not to trust Brave", which you're saying doesn't follow. I agree that it doesn't follow, but I'm reading their comment as saying "Brave's untrustworthiness is one reason not to use it, but another reason why you might not want to use it is..."
In a free market, you can of course spend your money any way you like; if you think a company shouldn't ought to hire people you as a customer disapprove of, then you can boycott that company. But the fact that we're increasingly viewing corporations as responsible and sharing in the guilt of an employee's personal and political views worries me a great deal. It's like we're progressively losing the ability to compartmentalize, and to permit others to compartmentalize, and I think it's fundamentally threatening society's ability to function as a diverse collection of viewpoints.
> But the fact that we're increasingly viewing corporations as responsible and sharing in the guilt of an employee's personal and political views worries me a great deal.
For me it's sort of the other way around entirely. I don't view corporations as "responsible" or "sharing in the guilt", in fact I don't really see corporations as moral entities at all, except insofar as that's sometimes useful to persuade their CEOs to do things (e.g. not destroy the planet with pollution).
I don't know anything about Brave's corporate structure (and don't care to), so take the following as hypothetical. In any business, there are a number of people at the top trying to get rich. And that business will also employ any number of people who are not going to profit (e.g. janitors). I'm sure any business the size of Google employs a few racist janitors, it's just the law of large numbers. I don't "blame" Google for employing these people, nor does it dissuade me from doing business with them.
But when the person at the top running the company and directly profiting from it has terrible views, maybe I have a moral obligation not to give them my money, if that's possible. And if the board of directors of a company chooses to retain a CEO with deplorable views, maybe I have an obligation not to give them my money, either. So I think you can argue that someone has an obligation not to do business with Brave without saying that you blame the corporation as such. This goes double when the people are the top are funneling those profits into campaigns to deny people their rights.
At a high enough level of abstraction, a corporation is just a profit-creation engine. At a high enough level of abstraction, cancer is just a reproduction-oriented microbe. I suppose it doesn't make sense to blame either of them for what it does. Even so, I don't think it's right to aid them.
> society's ability to function as a diverse collection of viewpoints.
I worry about this too, quite a lot actually. But I think one requirement for society to have the ability to function as a diverse collection of viewpoints is that we collectively not tolerate people who have views antithetical to society functioning in that way. It's one thing to believe that it's wrong for gay people to be married: it's another thing to push for the state to prevent them from marrying.
I mean, and I believe that it's one thing to believe that it's wrong to push for the state to prevent gay people from marrying, but it's another entirely to push for companies to fire people who believe that.
I am in favor of gay marriage, but I believe society can survive without it. I'm not sure it can survive without political compartmentalization.
I guess you could call me a libertarian in that I believe that the first and best defense from government, corporate and mob tyranny is to just go somewhere else. The enforcement of mere majority moral beliefs on the entirety of society directly threatens that belief. You may say that's just democracy, but I disagree; I think majority rule is not quite the same. ("51% democracy", if you will.) The flourishing of a society and its peoples is maximized if locally contradictory views can exist simultaneously, preferably by a process of self-sorting. But such a process would, if moral fault is propagated along corporate and financial lines, either damage the economy by effectively decoupling large sections from each other (you see this in the right-wing news market, which has become almost totally disjunct from the left-wing news market, and the split is propagating across logistics lines), or else damage liberty by enforcing the most effective and motivating (!not! the most morally just) beliefs through chilling effects and monopoly positions. That's why I think the decision to support a corporation must be decoupled from the views of the employees, so that the political arena can be insulated from the economical one, allowing a connected economy at the same time as a diverse society.
