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You're mistaken, or simply misleading. Brave has never inserted affiliate links into any content. What you may be referring to was the offering of affiliate lin
by jonathansampson 6y ago
You're mistaken, or simply misleading. Brave has never inserted affiliate links into any content. What you may be referring to was the offering of affiliate links within the suggestions-dropdown in the browser itself. We wrote about this back in June of this year: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/.
When a user searched (e.g. 'binance'), the browser would check to see if an affiliate link existed. If it did, it would be displayed as a suggested URL. If the user were to press Enter at that point, they would be sent to the domain, with Brave's affiliate code in tow. We did make a mistake, however. We unintentionally matched against a fully-qualified URL as well (e.g. binance.us). We were able to fix that within a couple of days, however.
This is not in any way "sketchy". Open Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, or Edge and perform a search for "Hacker News". You'll note that in Firefox, and Opera (IIRC) you're sent to Google with an affiliate-identifier in the URL. In Edge and Vivaldi, I believe you're sent to Bing, but with the same type of identifier.