Why I Recommend Against Brave

Summary

Highlights

• Brave browser has been embroiled in multiple controversies, tarnishing its privacy-focused reputation 🚨.
• Founder Brendan Eich's controversial past has impacted the brand's trustworthiness 💥.
• Unauthorized referral links and crypto involvement have raised ethical questions for Brave 🌐.
• Privacy issues like DNS leaks and data sales challenge Brave's core promise ⚖️.
• Brave's leadership shows worrying ties to right-wing ideologies and fundraising for them 👀.

Key Takeaways

• Brave browser's privacy claims are marred by multiple controversies and privacy breaches 😱.
• The founder's controversial history raises questions about the leadership's values 🤔.
• Brave's advertising model includes issues like unauthorized referral links 💸.
• The browser's involvement with cryptocurrencies and AI raises privacy concerns 🛡️.
• Brave's deviation from privacy-centric principles dilutes its initial promise 🌐.

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Brave Browser The chapter 'Introduction to Brave Browser' discusses the Brave browser, a Chromium-based browser known for its emphasis on personal privacy. It highlights the browser's built-in ad blocking and content blocking features, along with additional services like VPN and T access. Brave is recognized on privacy-focused sites like the Privacy Tools website. Despite its features and reputation, the chapter begins with a contradictory stance, suggesting there might be reasons to avoid using the Brave browser. The text ends with a cliffhanger by asking where the Brave browser has its origins.
• 00:30 - 02:30: Origins of Brave and Brendan Eich's Controversial Past Brave was founded in 2015 by its current CEO, Brendan Eich. Eich is renowned as the creator of the JavaScript programming language, a significant achievement considering JavaScript's widespread use in web browsers today. Before Brave, Eich was involved with Netscape Communications Corporation, known for its Netscape Navigator web browser, an important player in internet history.
• 02:30 - 05:00: Early Controversies and Ethically Questionable Ventures The chapter discusses the early career of a software developer who significantly contributed to the JavaScript interpreter known as Spider Monkey. Initially, the interpreter was developed for Netscape and later continued under Mozilla when they inherited Netscape's code. Mozilla was founded as a free and open-source project, largely to facilitate open-source contributions to the Netscape browser. The developer remained heavily involved in the project, overseeing the development of Spider Monkey under Mozilla starting in 1998 and growing his career within the organization.
• 05:00 - 09:30: Issues with Donations and Referral Links The chapter discusses the transition of the development of SpiderMonkey, a JavaScript engine used in various Mozilla projects, including Firefox. After playing a significant role, the original developer stepped down and passed the baton to Dave Mandolin in 2011.
• 14:00 - 16:30: Tor Functionality and Security Issues The chapter discusses issues surrounding Tor's functionality and security, highlighting incidents such as Mozilla employees expressing concern and resigning due to leadership's donations to anti-LGBTQ+ political organizations. These donations created unease among employees, particularly those within the LGBTQ+ community, due to the problematic nature of the organizations supported. The chapter further explores the implications of such actions on the organization's internal environment.
• 16:30 - 20:00: Search Data Sales and Privacy Concerns The chapter discusses a scandal involving donations supporting Proposition 8, a movement to ban same-sex marriages in California in 2008. The backlash from this scandal led to significant consequences, including half of the Mozilla board stepping down. The CEO of the company involved was compelled to express regret and vowed to work with LGBT communities as a response to the backlash.
• 25:00 - 30:00: Deprecated Privacy Features and Final Thoughts In this chapter, the focus is on the fallout and the public relations battles surrounding a CEO who faces backlash for mishandling privacy features. The controversy seems centered on the CEO's preference for launching a PR campaign to manage his image rather than showing genuine remorse for the issues at hand. Activists respond by mounting an online campaign to pressure the CEO to resign, with significant impacts such as a notable pushback from the dating site, Okay Cupid. The chapter concludes with final thoughts on the situation, reflecting on the challenges and steps necessary for restoring trust in an increasingly scrutinized digital landscape.

Why I Recommend Against Brave Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 if you're keen on personal privacy you might have come across Brave browser Brave is a chromium based browser that promises to deliver privacy with built-in ad blocking and content blocking protection it also offers several quality of life features and services such as a VPN and T access I mean it's even listed on the reputable uh privacy tools website so why am I telling you to steer clear of this browser then let us take a step back so firstly where did the brave browser even
• 00:30 - 01:00 come from Brave was founded in 2015 by its current CEO who is called Brandon a if his name rings to you there might be multiple reasons for it uh Brandon is most famously known as the creator of the JavaScript programming language the language your browser can interpret and run back during these days that the Netscape communication Corporation the company behind the historical Netscape Navigator web browser furthermore he
• 01:00 - 01:30 wrote the original version of spider monkey the JavaScript interpreter that Firefox uses to this day and a continued to oversee the development of spider monkey under Mozilla from 1998 onwards after Mozilla had inherited the Netscape code in fact Mozilla was funded by a co-funded and others as a free and open source project around the same time frame the Mozilla project was meant to be a rapper for the open source contribution for the net skape browser and a grew his career inside the mozil
• 01:30 - 02:00 organization even becoming the appointed CTO in August 2005 and continued to develop spider monkey until 2011 when he seted its development to Dave mandolin there's some uh house work going on in the background I hope you don't hear that his career at Mozilla started to decline when after being appointed CEO of Mozilla Corporation on March 24 2014
• 02:00 - 02:30 several moila employees called him to resign this happened because Brendan H had been donating small sums of money to very problematic anti-lgbtq political organizations which right rightfully CA mosil employees were part of the LGBT community to feel uneasy and in danger under the new leadership over the years a has donated more money to incredibly problematic political initiatives and organizations such as California poos 8
• 02:30 - 03:00 a movement that sought to ban same-sex marriages in the state of California back in 2008 on top of some even more generous donations to Tom McClinton a republican politician who supported Proposition 8 this Scandal caused a chin reaction that led half of mozila board to step down ultimately his uh this backlash forced the CEO to express sorrow for causing pain and promised that he would work with LGBT communities and and Ali statements that were in all
• 03:00 - 03:30 likelihood motivated by the necessity of Saving Face and running a PR campaign to cleanse In His Image and avoid stepping down as the CEO rather than rather than by you know genuine regret predictably these empty excuses were not enough to soften the blow and some activists created an online campaign against a to pressure him to step down as CEO one of one of the hardest blows let's say was caused by the dating website Okay Cupid
• 03:30 - 04:00 which began displaying a message warning the users about ache actions and strongly encouraging them not to access their websites using Firefox or other Mozilla products as a form of boycott when a user was using a Firefox user agent shortly after on April 3rd 2014 Brandon EG finally agreed to step down as Mozilla CEO and decided to leave Mozilla as a whole after a two years yatus ik finally came back and launched
• 04:00 - 04:30 a new web browser Brave software with its development version getting released in January 2016 after obtaining two and half million dollar in funding in late 2015 shortly followed by another 4 and half million funding in 2016 as we are about to see however this story is far far from over and even this new Venture will quickly prove to be at the very least uh ethically questionable
• 04:30 - 05:00 with this out of the way let's keep going although the browser had just been released the first controversy around it did not take long to surface in 2016 Brave browser shared a plan to launch a feature called Brave at replacement uh the feature pretty much did or planned to do what it said that it would it would block existing advertisement online and replace them with privacy friendly ads that brave itself would inject to the website according to Brave smart in these new Brave heads would
• 05:00 - 05:30 also pay Publishers which would have made them sustainable however it would have done so in a volatile cryptocurrency instead cutting down the reliable Fiat income stream and they would pay them half compared to before and of course they would also take themselves a 15% of the cut just for themselves this idea was about as bad as you would expect to like any reason reasonable person and it really never
• 05:30 - 06:00 came to life soon enough the newspaper associ Association La of America reacted to the issue by well issuing Brave AAS and diseased letter calling out what Brave was doing as BL blatantly illegal if you think this is bad enough though I recommend that you mentally prepare for what's to come 2016 was 9 years ago already just time flew by which means that we still have a little bit short of an entire decade of screw-ups to cover
• 06:00 - 06:30 in 2018 Tom Scott a content creator famous for creating incredibly entertaining videos where he creates unusual stuffs tweeted a warning Twitter followers not to send donations to anyone asking for anything in his name as he was not taking donations he said that brave was using his Nam and photo without his consent what was really happening well Brave was collecting donations in their cryptocurrency from its users to create uh to create
• 06:30 - 07:00 um and website owners offering to pay them out when it reached a minimum value of 100 bucks this program was open to any website owner regardless of whether they had a brave rewards account or not thus Tom Scott one day noticed that brave was accepting donation on his behalf thought to himself oh I never set that up and believed that he was being impersonated it wasn't but I can see why you would think that naturally Tom reached out to Brave demanding to opt
• 07:00 - 07:30 out to this campaign and cutting him verba him the company responded that we'll see what we can do and refunds are impossible anyway the latter is true since well you know these are crypto donations and they are Anonymous that's impossible to refund but this only added to the idea of Brave being some scummy impersonator for what it's worth brave brave um quickly rolled out an improved infographic that made it a bit clearer that they were not affiliated with the
• 07:30 - 08:00 creators that you could donate to and Tom deleted the tweets uh since but then in 2020 it was found that brave browser injected referral links into urals of crypto wallets and exchange websites like coinbase referral links are a common marketing uh campaign used by several services to encourage onboarding of new users how they typically work is that a user of a service May advertise the platform to new users and encourage them to join with our referral link um
• 08:00 - 08:30 used to validate the identity of the person and entity who invited them and the more new users a person help helps sign up through their referral link the more they are rewarded by the service a typical reward is a small share of the royalties from a purchase a user mix a discount on a paid Tire features or other benefits that have monary value Amazon affiliate program which relies on sending out products uh links augmented with a ref referral code to get small
• 08:30 - 09:00 commissions from the eventual purchases it's an example of that the person who initially sented alarm was Twitter user cryptonator 1337 obviously who having a good level of involvement with cryptocurrency and blockchain Community noticed that something fishy was going on when he used Brave browser to log binance his crypto exchange of choice the browser would silently add up a a query string containing Braves affiliate
• 09:00 - 09:30 code yes without ever informing the user let alone asking for permission Brave would inject its own referral ID to the URLs that contain a domain related to a crypto wallet or of some kind just to make a quick back users would sign up for those services using Braves referral and benoun to them involuntarily giving Brave money now yes the CEO apologized and said that they are not perfect but they course correct quickly disabling
• 09:30 - 10:00 the feature entirely it's nonetheless extremely worrying that they thought that this was accept acceptable in the first place by the way this is the same exact behavior that got on to be marked as a turble scam nowadays moving forward what is the absolute funniest thing a browser whose main selling point is having a strong buil-in ad blocker could do and well if you thought serving ads right in its user interface would be up there you thought well in January 2020 Brave officially introduced this sponsored image program directing its
• 10:00 - 10:30 presentation to partner businesses and advertisers by default Brave browser would start to display sponsored images as the background for the home and new tab Pages it all started with an innocent feature Brave would already rotate several pictures on its new page a feature that users liked things took a turn for the worse when a Twitter user randomly suggested Brave would add pictures from a SpaceX rocket launch to the r ation since spe SpaceX had
• 10:30 - 11:00 released and licensed those pictures under a creative common license this addition prompted users to wonder whether SpaceX was paying for those pictures being added to the rotation they weren't but this convers conversation caused Brave to have yet another bright idea what if we charged advertisers to push their own ads right into the user new tab pages so they did that naturally people didn't like that they it was a bad first impression that
• 11:00 - 11:30 a browser whose main selling point was a built-in ad blocking would serve ads by default right in the UI and furthermore they found the nature of thats pretty suspicious since a lot of them were related to cryptocurrencies Not only was this decision not reversed but one of Brave contributors considered the idea of adding friction to the opt out process two years later thankfully that suggestion has not been implemented but it speaks volume about the mission that brave is trying to go for the point has
• 11:30 - 12:00 never been putting users in control the point has always been to lure privacy and conscious users to use a product that was meant to be nothing but a cash cow with a primary goal of extract extracting every single scent of profit that can be extracted no I cannot pronounce that word extracted in any way ethical or not in 2021 Brave shipped a tour functionality that leaked onion addresses as part of the DNS traffic EXP exposing users using Tor for anony
• 12:00 - 12:30 anonymity I just can't do it today to a really bad security issue Tor which stands for the onion router is a protocol and an overlay Network that allows people to access the web in a completely anonimous form by routing the user traffic through a random path of decentralized nodes passing data between them in such a way that the negative impact of one Malian note malicious note would uh make limited furthermore users who are connected to the Tor Network may
• 12:30 - 13:00 visit onion domains special websites that are inaccessible from the regular www protocol and that are typically used to guarantee complete anonymity the main use case for Tor is providing users with again complete anonymity in cases where it's crucial to have it Thor is widely used by investigative journalists political opponents activists and other categories of people who are highly likely to be targeted or watched by an entity that
• 13:00 - 13:30 seeks to harm them the project gets regularly used for those cases where any privacy leak would result in significant personal repercussion for the user in question above all things the main thing that must not happen is leaking data to the user ISP which knows all about their real identity and who must comply with federal laws the latter is what actually happened for a while Brave browser had been exposing the do onion domain that people visited as part as DNS DNS
• 13:30 - 14:00 traffic hence completely breaking one of the main points of using tour keeping your activity on the on your network from your ISP the damage of this could somehow be mitigated in case the user had manually changed the DNS provider the system is configured to use from the default value to something like quad 9 DNS provider that has a good track truck record for caring about privacy but not only is that not optimal but it's also the unlikely scenario since the default
• 14:00 - 14:30 case is using your isp's DNS server what it means is that it is entirely possible that users who used Brave store feature for carrying out task that required complete anonymity had been telling their service provider what website they had been visiting the entire time potentially putting them in great danger then in 2023 Brave announced that they be selling their search data to AI companies for inference according to
• 14:30 - 15:00 st.com it also included AI training though I wasn't able to confirm this this C some push back especially since Brave search Snippets of web pages are particularly lengthy and contain a good slice of the content some websites as a result wanted to opt out of this which means blocking the brave curler however Brave search scraper does not have any identifiable information that would allows us to block it specifically differently from other curlers who
• 15:00 - 15:30 usually put a company name or something in the user agent as an example years being openly disclosing the user agents which includes the word being bot well why is braving hiding itself well according to their own quite angry email to the other of the blog post that I've shown you they just don't have the resources resources to contact all domain owners who rightfully or not discriminate against anyone but Google what they are saying is Well a lot of
• 15:30 - 16:00 websites intentionally ask not to be scraped by other search engines or by Braves specifically and we don't have the resources to complain about this to them thus we will do it secretly so that you cannot block us unless you also block Google well what is one of the funniest thing a so-called privacy oriented browser could do if you guess taking away privacy features that were previously implemented you got it right again in 2024 Brave decid to deprecate
• 16:00 - 16:30 deprecate the option for strict fingerprinting protection this feature is useful to try and stop website from following users around the web and uniquely identify them and creating a personal fingerprint of them composed of a little set of detail such as whether they use dark mode or what operating system they are on the reason for removing the picture is that when see when set to strict mode fingerprinting protection caused um several sides to break while this might be true however
• 16:30 - 17:00 there is little point in not giving the user the chance to even choose from themselves something that one would take from granted for a browser that is supposed to be all about privacy and putting the user first there's a few other minor things that still bug me like Brave decided to pay for advertisement whenever a user searched for Firefox in the Play Store fair enough this playing forget the fox in the title of the application many users thought this slogan was unprofessional
• 17:00 - 17:30 and I kind of agree to some extent but sure not a big deal that said the VP of Brave decided to go on Twitter and claim it was photoshopped even though multiple independent people were claiming it was true and posting screenshots about it did he not know about the campaign was he lying I'm deeply confused and just going through his Twitter feed again this is the VP of Brave gives me negative confidence in his product is
• 17:30 - 18:00 100% into all things crypto from nfts to FTX when it ex existed uses AI generated images to promote nfts and such retweets right-wing activists nothing of this is necessarily better in itself but it certainly does not inspire me confidence in his product be to you though similarly enough Brandon H speed is also
• 18:00 - 18:30 containing some Waring content in my opinion ranging from again retweeting retweeting right-wing activist to weird Republican propaganda he claims to be an independent and not Republican but this does not make me any less worried about the type of ideas that he follows but yeah if you're a big fan of AI and crypto and you're okay with having advertisement in the user interface out of the box and you're okay with P attempts to steal money from websites
• 18:30 - 19:00 and collect donations towards people who wouldn't necessarily even receive it plus you can put up with um occasional privacy mistakes let's call them that sure go ahead just breathe I wouldn't recommend it but you you do you