I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program, making (presumably) thousands of dollars off their users.
Personally I agree with the OP; and I refuse to use Brave. This isn’t based in dislike of cryptocurrency in general; but I DESPISE both ADVERTISING AND SHITCOINS (Basically any token or sub-token of a main standalone blockchain that has no real, significant, usable real world value).
Therefore Brave DOES NOT reflect my values. I don’t care if advertising networks make any money, I actively hate them enough I want to deprive them due to their behaviors anyway for being so violently anti-user.
I don’t use Chrome or Brave because they DO NOT reflect my beliefs regarding web standards either, and I refuse to allow Google and the Chromium and Chrome project to dictate standards either. Particularly of note is their utter failure with both FLOC and WEB-INTEGRITY; both of which are stupidly retarded anti-user and anti-privacy features which are horrible.
Web Integrity might be the worst Google thing yet