There are many enemies of privacy. There are politicians claiming the (at best) misguided pretense of “protecting the children,” intellig...

There are many enemies of privacy. There are politicians claiming the (at best) misguided pretense of “protecting the children,” intellig…

  • @ExtremeDullard
    32•3 months ago

    From TFA:

    The Brave-haters are almost certainly foaming at the mouth reading that paragraph. They’ll cite concerns like Brave’s affiliate link scandal, the collection of funds ostensibly on behalf of creators without telling them, the installation of programs without user consent

    You don’t have to hate Brave to distrust Brave.

    If any of your friends in real life did something fishy to you once, you’d immediately stop talking to him. Possibly, maybe, if your former friend apologized and swore he’d never do it again, and he was convincing enough, and he treated you right for quite some time, maybe you’d take him back as a friend. But even if you did, if he did something fishy to you again, surely you’d dump him for good this time - and probably punch him in the face too.

    The Brave company did this THREE TIMES and there are still people who trust them?

    Me, I don’t hate them. I just don’t trust them. I wouldn’t trust them to run a calculator utility on my computer, let alone something as critical to my digital life as a browser. They lost my trust not once, not twice, but three times.

    In addition, their cryptocurrency thing doesn’t help build trust either. I classify anybody who dabbles in crypto as instantly sketchy by default, and they’d have to work extra-hard to earn my trust. Brave has done the exact opposite: they’re a crypto-scheme-running bunch who made a supposedly privacy-friendly browser, and I could kind of believe they needed the crypto scheme to make a living. Kind of, but I chose to believe it for a while. Unti Brave did their first fishy thing, and then I instantly uninstalled their browser, never to install it again.

    Brave is NOT trustworthy. In my opinion, if you trust them. you’re gullible, or you actively want to believe them too much. It’s not hatred, it’s just plain common sense.

    • @h3ndrik@feddit.de
      7•3 months ago

      Haha, fool me once…

      Fool me thrice and dabble in crypto…

      (…And I’ll use LibreWolf instead)

    • McMacker4
      1•3 months ago

      I’m out of the loop. What were the three instances of fishy behaviour by the Brave company?

    • @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      1•3 months ago

      I have no problem with crypto, provided the people making the service aren’t the same as the people making the cryptocurrency, yet that’s what Brave did.

      Here’s how it should’ve worked:

      1. Brave includes an ad-blocker but default
      2. Brave talks to websites about a profit sharing option for sites - Brave would serve the ads using only local browsing history, the website gets most of the revenue (alternative is no revenue due to the ad blocker)
      3. Brave creates an option for users to pay in lieu of seeing ads

      Step 3 is where crypto comes in. Users could choose to pay in crypto, credit card, etc, and they’d fund a pool of money to be used for that (always for this site, ask every time, never for this site). Likewise, if websites prefer crypto, Brave could support that.

      The whole problem though is trying to pay users with crypto, which tells me this currency was always going to be problematic since Brave benefits from it reducing in value (reduces their payout).

      So I don’t use Brave for personal stuff, I only use it as a Chrome alternative for web testing because it has an ad blocker.