That's incorrect. Brave added a feature to the browser which would list Affiliate Links, if any, in pre-search UI. As the user typed something into the address-bar (e.g. 'Bitcoin'), Brave (the browser) would check local data to see if there were any relevant affiliate links. If it found one, it would enumerate it among the other search suggestions in the address-bar dropdown.
Note, affiliate links were not inserted into pages. Links on pages were not modified. Requests en-route were not re-routed. There were many ways people described this feature; most of them were incorrect. So what was the problem?
Our implementation of this feature had a mistake; it matched against fully-qualified URLs. As such, if you typed 'binance.us' into your address bar, and Brave had an affiliate code for that domain (which would be visibly shown before the user navigates), the browser sent you to the affiliate link instead of the non-affiliate link.
When this issue was brought to our attention, we confirmed the (undesired) behavior, owned the mistake, fixed the issue, and confirmed that no revenue would be made from that affiliate link. Mistakes do happen in software, and they will happen with Brave (try as we might to avoid them). What's important is that we moved quickly, fixed the issue, and maintained transparency.
Traffic attribution is not uncommon in browsers though; open Firefox and type something in your address bar. When you hit Enter, you'll find that Firefox adds a traffic-attribution token to the URL too (although they do this only after the request is being issued; Brave showed the token before navigation).
I hope this helps provide a bit of context to a very misunderstood bug in Brave's past.
That's incorrect. Brave added a feature to the browser which would list Affiliate Links, if any, in pre-search UI. As the user typed something into the address-bar (e.g. 'Bitcoin'), Brave (the browser) would check local data to see if there were any relevant affiliate links. If it found one, it would enumerate it among the other search suggestions in the address-bar dropdown.
Note, affiliate links were not inserted into pages. Links on pages were not modified. Requests en-route were not re-routed. There were many ways people described this feature; most of them were incorrect. So what was the problem?
Our implementation of this feature had a mistake; it matched against fully-qualified URLs. As such, if you typed 'binance.us' into your address bar, and Brave had an affiliate code for that domain (which would be visibly shown before the user navigates), the browser sent you to the affiliate link instead of the non-affiliate link.
When this issue was brought to our attention, we confirmed the (undesired) behavior, owned the mistake, fixed the issue, and confirmed that no revenue would be made from that affiliate link. Mistakes do happen in software, and they will happen with Brave (try as we might to avoid them). What's important is that we moved quickly, fixed the issue, and maintained transparency.
Traffic attribution is not uncommon in browsers though; open Firefox and type something in your address bar. When you hit Enter, you'll find that Firefox adds a traffic-attribution token to the URL too (although they do this only after the request is being issued; Brave showed the token before navigation).
I hope this helps provide a bit of context to a very misunderstood bug in Brave's past.