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.
Brave is not spyware. That website you linked is horrible and full of misinformation. They also claim that Firefox, and even Tor Browser, are spyware. They act as if any and all connections a browser makes are automatically bad and used for spying/tracking.
I won’t disagree with the other criticisms of Brave that you made, but just wanted to point that out. That website is just highly unreliable and makes verifiably false claims about the browsers it reviews.
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The neocities link calling Brave and other browsers spyware.
It is officially spyware now: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/10/18/brave-is-installing-vpn-services-without-user-consent/
Just commenting to let you know I’ve clarified a bit in the post. Also, stock Firefox is spyware so.
Stock as in out-of-the-box.
Just stop giving any advice please.
Never heard of that. Please do not just claim things without clarifying.
It’s a well known fact that Firefox is full of telemetry that you need to turn off. There’s a reason for so many user.js files and forks existing.
Using the terms “telemetry” and “spyware” interchangeably makes the former seem more nefarious and the latter less nefarious. I understand where you’re coming from but I wouldn’t want to see the term “spyware” diluted to include anonymised data about how users are using product features.
That’s not to say telemetry data is fine or that a company might claim to only use telemetry data isn’t actually using spyware.
I’d say that many telemetry servers counts as spyware.