Why I Recommend Against Brave

Summary

The video argues that Brave’s privacy-focused features do not outweigh its history of controversial product decisions and privacy failures. The narrator notes that Brave is Chromium-based and offers built-in ad and content blocking, as well as services such as a VPN and Tor browsing.

Key Points and Product Controversies

• Founder and background: The narrator recounts Brave’s origins under Brendan Eich, who previously worked at Mozilla and created JavaScript. Eich left Mozilla following controversy over his political donations to organizations opposing same-sex marriage.
• Proposed ad replacement (2016): Brave proposed blocking websites’ existing ads and inserting its own privacy-oriented ads instead. The proposal included cryptocurrency payments to publishers and a cut for Brave. The Newspaper Association of America reportedly objected with a cease-and-desist letter, and the plan did not proceed as proposed.
• Creator donations (2018): Brave’s rewards system allowed users to send cryptocurrency donations to websites and creators, including people who had not enrolled in the program. The video describes Tom Scott discovering donations collected in his name and asking Brave to remove them. Brave later clarified how the feature was presented.
• Referral links (2020): The narrator says Brave was found adding its referral code to URLs for cryptocurrency services without users’ knowledge or consent. Brave apologized and disabled the behavior.
• Ads in new tabs: Brave introduced sponsored images on new-tab pages. The narrator criticizes showing ads by default in a browser marketed for ad blocking. Users also questioned the prominence of cryptocurrency-related promotions.
• Tor privacy issue (2021): The video describes a bug that exposed visited .onion addresses through DNS traffic. Since DNS requests may go to a user’s internet provider by default, this could undermine Tor’s purpose of concealing browsing activity from that provider.
• Search data and crawling (2023): The narrator says Brave announced it would sell search data to AI companies for inference, while noting they could not confirm whether the data would also be used for AI training. They also criticize Brave Search’s crawler for lacking an identifying user-agent string, making it harder for site owners to block specifically.
• Fingerprinting protection (2024): According to the video, Brave removed the option for strict fingerprinting protection because it could break some websites. The narrator argues users should have been able to choose whether to accept that trade-off.
• Other concerns: The narrator also mentions Brave advertising when users searched for Firefox in an app store and expresses concern about public statements and social-media activity by Brave executives. These are presented as reasons for distrust rather than as technical defects.

Overall Assessment

The narrator’s recommendation against Brave rests on a pattern of monetization and trust concerns, along with the Tor-related privacy bug and the removal of a privacy setting. They acknowledge that users who accept the ads, cryptocurrency focus, and occasional privacy issues may still choose Brave, but say they would not recommend it.

Main Speaker and Sources

The video’s narrator is from Nicco Loves Linux. Sources and examples discussed include Brave announcements and responses, the Newspaper Association of America’s objection, Tom Scott’s account, a cryptocurrency user’s report of referral links, a news report about Brave Search and AI, and posts by Brave executives.