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.
I already wrote in another comment, but since you’re asking here, I’ll add i to this thread:
You probably shouldn’t use Brave over Firefox (and it’s forks), at least not as a primary browser, but it’s a great out of the box plug and play browser for average people, most of which are probably currently using chrome with no ad block.
If the average user was decently tech literate, companies wouldn’t buy ads any more, because they wouldn’t make anything off of them, since people don’t watch; but obviously they do.
The average person doesn’t want to have to install an ad-blocker - hell, the average person probably has no real idea of what an ad-blocker even is - and they don’t want to bother configuring anything either. They just want plug and play applications that will do everything they need. And for that, Brave is probably the best. E.g. if a family member called me asking for a browser recommendation, I’d probably just tell them to install Brave. I think I’ll keep doing that until I see a better plug and play browser.