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Reminder that Brave has done some morally questionable things in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controversies https://en.wikipedia

Reminder that Brave has done some morally questionable things in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)#Controvers... They've since corrected both of those things, but those are enough for me to choose not to trust them as an organization.

AegirLeet 5y ago
It's a browser with built-in cryptocurrency nonsense. That should tell you everything you need to know.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Yep. The fact that it even existed in the Brave browser at any point in time is enough to eternally dissuade me from using it.
  - jonathansampson 5y ago
    The BAT (and before it, Bitcoin) is there as an optional feature. It's not on or enabled by default. It's there for users who wish to anonymously earn rewards for their attention, and use those rewards to support content creators on the Web.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      ...except those "rewards" don't ever reach the creators pockets, unless they're savvy enough to make their own ERC wallet and go through the collection process.
      - celsoazevedo 5y ago
        "If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. [...] At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators." https://brave.com/faq-rewards/#unclaimed-funds https://brave.com/faq-rewards/#unclaimed-funds
        smoldesu 5y ago
        Case in point.
        throwaway292893 5y ago
        The only issue you have left with BAT is user education, got it. So thankfully the tech is solid. Now just UX polishing and onboarding. Personally, I think you're just being obtuse and looking for a problem. -- edit -- @dang, go fuck yourself, seriously. Until this edit I haven't said anything offensive. I've simply been a contrarian for many topics: technical, social, political, agricultural, philosophical. It seems you don't want a Socrates? Too bad. I can't help you allow these topics and other commenters post their opinions and I have opposing opinions. I'm always as respectful as the person I'm responding to is. I also don't bring the topics up in the first place, yet you target my response for bring a flamewar? Why not the post I was responding to with the opposing opinion? How is "got it" more offensive than "Case in point." How is pointing out GP's actions offensive? Care to point out exactly what you found so offensive? Again, go fuck yourself. You know what you're doing. Censorship isn't cool. Your Marxist, CCP dick-sucking side won't win. Go let China bend you and YCombinator over some more. That's offensive, true but offensive, until now I haven't posted anything offensive. Great moderating job dumbfuck.
        dang 5y ago
        We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and attacking other users. Seriously not cool. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598433.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        Draken93 5y ago
        Brave displays if a website is registered for the reward programm...
      - jonathansampson 5y ago
        [This post describes the behavior of Brave Payments in last 2018. It is not an accurate description for how the system works today, in 2021]. No, creators did not have to be savvy enough to make their own ERC-20 wallet. We worked with Uphold at the time. Creators could verify with Uphold (a wallet would be created for them), and we would then send Brave's BAT (earmarked for the creator by Brave users) from our own settlement wallet over to the creator.
- celsoazevedo 5y ago
  I have a few websites and receive payments from Brave Rewards almost every month. They pay me in BAT, but since I don't care about BAT or can use it directly, it gets converted to my local currency, which I then can use to pay for stuff. It's a mistake to assume something is nonsense or bad just because crypto is involved. Provided that you can convert it to something usable, it doesn't really matter if you're paid in dollars, BAT or something else.
  - simonw 5y ago
    How much are you earning? A few dollars a month or something more substantial?
    - celsoazevedo 5y ago
      A little over 800 BAT this year: https://i.imgur.com/p7o6QKT.png https://i.imgur.com/p7o6QKT.png That's ~400 dollars at current BAT prices ($0.49) or ~1200 dollars at the price BAT was ~1 month ago ($1.50). It's not a lot, BAT value isn't very stable and I'd make more money with Google Adsense, but this comes from users that block ads anyway. 400 is better than 0.
- tomstockmail 5y ago
  That, and anytime there's a critical comment on hackernews their employee's come flying in to do damage control.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    Yes, it happens in every thread about Brave. Full-on damage control at the smallest mention, which says a lot.
    - iJohnDoe 5y ago
      Depends are which side of the table you’re sitting at. I like Brave and many other people do. Just look at any of the other HN posts about Brave. Since I like Brave, from this side of the table it looks like the anti-Brave people come out in full force to try to spew the same old crap and badmouth Brave. At the point it is the tired old crap, which most has been debunked already.
      - tomstockmail 5y ago
        With the referral program and integration with a cryptocurrency, anyone can shill for it. It's hard if not impossible to know if someone promoting Brave has a stake in BAT or not. Those that are showing Braves many problems ("badmouth") don't have a stake one way or the other except to warn people.
        cheschire 5y ago
        That’s a romantic view. There’s folks on HN working for direct competitors of brave. I doubt that everyone defending brave is a shill, or that everyone criticizing it does so with the purest intent as you’re suggesting.
        tomstockmail 5y ago
        The only real competitors for Brave are other cryptocurrencies, which yes there are many. I feel there's plenty of reasons to not like Brave and few if any are about suggesting a superior cryptocurrency. The only non-compromised Brave users I've come across are mobile, and they are the ones that find using the Firefox add-ons menu to install uBlock origin too complicated. They are unlikely to learn the BAT system.
yellow_lead 5y ago
Seriously. For a privacy focused org to have these moral failings makes me skeptical they won't abuse users' trust in the future. I still don't think it's right to accept donations on behalf of someone you have no prior agreement with.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  That's a misleading way to frame it; Brave distributed BAT tokens to its users at the time (this was in 2018). We then asked those users to give (or "mark") those tokens to their favorite content creators. Some gave them to verified creators (who were shown with a check-mark, similar to Twitter), while others gave them to unverified creators (who had no distinguishing marks, similar again to Twitter). When the creator was unverified, the BAT (which Brave gave to the user) was deposited into a settlement wallet, waiting to be claimed (similar to how PayPal lets you email money to others). Needless to say, there were may naive UI/UX components in the product and process, and the community feedback that we acted upon (quickly, within a couple days) was phenomenal. Read more at https://brave.com/rewards-update/ https://brave.com/rewards-update/.
  - opheliate 5y ago
    I disagree with you that it's a misleading way to frame your company's actions. Even if users all knew that the creators had no relationship with Brave, the company was still accepting donations on their behalf, which is what the parent comment said. And to be clear, I'm highly doubtful that the users were all aware that there was no relationship there. Framing the distinction as being between "verified" and "unverified" creators is disingenuous IMO: On any other platform, creators being "unverified" would mean they'd signed up, but just hadn't confirmed some details yet. The comparison of the check-marks to Twitter is also very strange, Twitter's own UI would prime users to think that a check-mark signified a notable user, not just any user who'd signed up. Whereas Brave's "unverified" users have no relationship to the company whatsoever. Perhaps this was all just naivete on the part of Brave, but it's very concerning to me that a company which (presumably) intends to become the de-facto method of monetising content could possibly be so naive as to how their actions would be perceived.
judge2020 5y ago
Didn't even realize the extent of the referral codes. Imagine if Chrome auto-inserted their own amazon affiliate links when people typed in Amazon.com - people would be up in arms.
- vntok 5y ago
  Why would people be in arms? Seems like a perfectly fine thing to do. They are literally referring people with buy intent to amazon's deep product pages.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    I've since clarified my comment, I meant if Chrome inserted affiliate links, not Google (search). For chrome doing it, the same applies to Brave as those people would have visited binance.us regardless of if Brave inserted their referral code link there.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  It's traffic attribution; Brave showed the affiliate option to users via a pre-search UI panel in the browser (screenshot: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png). Users could then decide to use the top suggested result, or not. The mistake here was matching on fully-qualified URLs, as opposed to search-input exclusively (the intended behavior). You can read more about it here: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/. No element of this is malicious. As for what others do, traffic attribution is common. Open Firefox and perform a search from the address bar. Long before you press Enter, Firefox has already sent keystrokes off to Google.com (assuming you haven't changed your default search engine), along with a tag on the URL identifying Firefox as the source of the traffic.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    The problem is that referral programs are intended to get people who wouldn't have signed up for a site to use it, and for binance that means getting people not already signed up to sign up and trade crypto on binance.us. This includes the referer getting up to 40% of trading fees[0]. Even for the example where a user chooses between the search 'binance' and `binance.us/?ref=`, in both cases they were already planning to visit and/or sign up for the crypto trading site, Brave didn't do any referring themselves. The profit sharing aspect makes it far-removed from the notion of just being for traffic attribution. 0: https://support.binance.us/hc/en-us/articles/360047428793-Referral-Program-Details#:~:text=40%25%20of%20your%20invitee%27s%20trading%20fees https://support.binance.us/hc/en-us/articles/360047428793-Re...
jonathansampson 5y ago
You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong; that isn't the case. Brave is designed in every way to preclude abuse from the design stage, and with a Can't Be Evil mindset, as opposed to the Don't Be Evil of Google. If you have questions about Brave, or Brave Search, we're always happy to chat. - 2018 Rewards Update documented at https://brave.com/rewards-update/ https://brave.com/rewards-update/ - Affiliate Codes explained at https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ - The Tor/DNS issue resulted from https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/ https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/
- tnorthcutt 5y ago
  I appreciate the response! I stand by what I said, but I do appreciate you adding your perspective and sharing links so that others can read what Brave as an organization has to say about these incidents.
  - jonathansampson 5y ago
    Fair enough; I can respect that :) Always happy to chat if anybody has any other questions about Brave.
- judge2020 5y ago
  > You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong; They're not saying Brave did anything intentionally wrong, they're just big enough mistakes that it's not possible for them, personally, to trust the organization. > those are enough for me to choose not to trust them as an organization
  - howolduis 5y ago
    then what about this?: > On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users type a URL of Binance into the address bar, which earns Brave money. Further research revealed that Brave redirects the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites, too. In response to the backlash from the users, Brave's CEO apologized and called it a "mistake" and said "we're correcting". Seems intentional... Don't insult our intelligence and tell us that this was an "accident" or "unintended mistaken".
pmurt7 5y ago
It's funny seeing all these folks nitpicking at Brave but who are fine using Google or Microsoft every day.
- Nicksil 5y ago
  >It's funny seeing all these folks nitpicking at Brave but who are fine using Google or Microsoft every day. How do you know this?
- Dah00n 5y ago
  Citation needed.
annoyingnoob 5y ago
I'm concerned about what happens to data Brave collects when Brave decides to sell itself. At some point they could be attractive to acquire.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  Brave doesn't collect user data. We believe in Can't be Evil over Don't be Evil.
  - annoyingnoob 5y ago
    Define 'user data'.
  - annoyingnoob 5y ago
    To be clear, I only mentioned 'data' generically and not 'user data' specifically. Its clear that Brave Ads collects data, even if you don't consider that data to be user data.
    - jonathansampson 5y ago
      Correct. Data is collected. We detail that data and the privacy-preserving process by which it is collected at https://www.brave.com/p3a/ https://www.brave.com/p3a/. When you consider the type of data collected, it's clear why Brave is still identified as the "most private" browser among leading options: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. Everything we do is designed for user-privacy and security, first and foremost. No amount of data is worth breaking your trust.
  - kup0 5y ago
    Repeating this bumper sticker mantra is honestly consistently unhelpful and comes off smug, IMHO
AzzieElbab 5y ago
I do my best to avoid sarcasm, but but but... have you looked at other players in search?
nextstep 5y ago
Wow, thank you for sharing. I think I’ll stick with Google for now because they’ve never done anything morally questionable.

AegirLeet 5y ago

It's a browser with built-in cryptocurrency nonsense. That should tell you everything you need to know.

smoldesu 5y ago
Yep. The fact that it even existed in the Brave browser at any point in time is enough to eternally dissuade me from using it.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  The BAT (and before it, Bitcoin) is there as an optional feature. It's not on or enabled by default. It's there for users who wish to anonymously earn rewards for their attention, and use those rewards to support content creators on the Web.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    ...except those "rewards" don't ever reach the creators pockets, unless they're savvy enough to make their own ERC wallet and go through the collection process.
    - celsoazevedo 5y ago
      "If a publisher has not verified ownership, then a user’s contributions will be held in reserve inside the browser for 90 days. [...] At the end of the 90 day period, any contributions marked for unverified publishers will be released back to the wallet. No funds leave the browser except to go to verified creators." https://brave.com/faq-rewards/#unclaimed-funds https://brave.com/faq-rewards/#unclaimed-funds
      - smoldesu 5y ago
        Case in point.
        throwaway292893 5y ago
        The only issue you have left with BAT is user education, got it. So thankfully the tech is solid. Now just UX polishing and onboarding. Personally, I think you're just being obtuse and looking for a problem. -- edit -- @dang, go fuck yourself, seriously. Until this edit I haven't said anything offensive. I've simply been a contrarian for many topics: technical, social, political, agricultural, philosophical. It seems you don't want a Socrates? Too bad. I can't help you allow these topics and other commenters post their opinions and I have opposing opinions. I'm always as respectful as the person I'm responding to is. I also don't bring the topics up in the first place, yet you target my response for bring a flamewar? Why not the post I was responding to with the opposing opinion? How is "got it" more offensive than "Case in point." How is pointing out GP's actions offensive? Care to point out exactly what you found so offensive? Again, go fuck yourself. You know what you're doing. Censorship isn't cool. Your Marxist, CCP dick-sucking side won't win. Go let China bend you and YCombinator over some more. That's offensive, true but offensive, until now I haven't posted anything offensive. Great moderating job dumbfuck.
        dang 5y ago
        We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and attacking other users. Seriously not cool. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598433.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        Draken93 5y ago
        Brave displays if a website is registered for the reward programm...
    - jonathansampson 5y ago
      [This post describes the behavior of Brave Payments in last 2018. It is not an accurate description for how the system works today, in 2021]. No, creators did not have to be savvy enough to make their own ERC-20 wallet. We worked with Uphold at the time. Creators could verify with Uphold (a wallet would be created for them), and we would then send Brave's BAT (earmarked for the creator by Brave users) from our own settlement wallet over to the creator.
celsoazevedo 5y ago
I have a few websites and receive payments from Brave Rewards almost every month. They pay me in BAT, but since I don't care about BAT or can use it directly, it gets converted to my local currency, which I then can use to pay for stuff. It's a mistake to assume something is nonsense or bad just because crypto is involved. Provided that you can convert it to something usable, it doesn't really matter if you're paid in dollars, BAT or something else.
- simonw 5y ago
  How much are you earning? A few dollars a month or something more substantial?
  - celsoazevedo 5y ago
    A little over 800 BAT this year: https://i.imgur.com/p7o6QKT.png https://i.imgur.com/p7o6QKT.png That's ~400 dollars at current BAT prices ($0.49) or ~1200 dollars at the price BAT was ~1 month ago ($1.50). It's not a lot, BAT value isn't very stable and I'd make more money with Google Adsense, but this comes from users that block ads anyway. 400 is better than 0.
tomstockmail 5y ago
That, and anytime there's a critical comment on hackernews their employee's come flying in to do damage control.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  Yes, it happens in every thread about Brave. Full-on damage control at the smallest mention, which says a lot.
  - iJohnDoe 5y ago
    Depends are which side of the table you’re sitting at. I like Brave and many other people do. Just look at any of the other HN posts about Brave. Since I like Brave, from this side of the table it looks like the anti-Brave people come out in full force to try to spew the same old crap and badmouth Brave. At the point it is the tired old crap, which most has been debunked already.
    - tomstockmail 5y ago
      With the referral program and integration with a cryptocurrency, anyone can shill for it. It's hard if not impossible to know if someone promoting Brave has a stake in BAT or not. Those that are showing Braves many problems ("badmouth") don't have a stake one way or the other except to warn people.
      - cheschire 5y ago
        That’s a romantic view. There’s folks on HN working for direct competitors of brave. I doubt that everyone defending brave is a shill, or that everyone criticizing it does so with the purest intent as you’re suggesting.
        tomstockmail 5y ago
        The only real competitors for Brave are other cryptocurrencies, which yes there are many. I feel there's plenty of reasons to not like Brave and few if any are about suggesting a superior cryptocurrency. The only non-compromised Brave users I've come across are mobile, and they are the ones that find using the Firefox add-ons menu to install uBlock origin too complicated. They are unlikely to learn the BAT system.

yellow_lead 5y ago

Seriously. For a privacy focused org to have these moral failings makes me skeptical they won't abuse users' trust in the future. I still don't think it's right to accept donations on behalf of someone you have no prior agreement with.

jonathansampson 5y ago
That's a misleading way to frame it; Brave distributed BAT tokens to its users at the time (this was in 2018). We then asked those users to give (or "mark") those tokens to their favorite content creators. Some gave them to verified creators (who were shown with a check-mark, similar to Twitter), while others gave them to unverified creators (who had no distinguishing marks, similar again to Twitter). When the creator was unverified, the BAT (which Brave gave to the user) was deposited into a settlement wallet, waiting to be claimed (similar to how PayPal lets you email money to others). Needless to say, there were may naive UI/UX components in the product and process, and the community feedback that we acted upon (quickly, within a couple days) was phenomenal. Read more at https://brave.com/rewards-update/ https://brave.com/rewards-update/.
- opheliate 5y ago
  I disagree with you that it's a misleading way to frame your company's actions. Even if users all knew that the creators had no relationship with Brave, the company was still accepting donations on their behalf, which is what the parent comment said. And to be clear, I'm highly doubtful that the users were all aware that there was no relationship there. Framing the distinction as being between "verified" and "unverified" creators is disingenuous IMO: On any other platform, creators being "unverified" would mean they'd signed up, but just hadn't confirmed some details yet. The comparison of the check-marks to Twitter is also very strange, Twitter's own UI would prime users to think that a check-mark signified a notable user, not just any user who'd signed up. Whereas Brave's "unverified" users have no relationship to the company whatsoever. Perhaps this was all just naivete on the part of Brave, but it's very concerning to me that a company which (presumably) intends to become the de-facto method of monetising content could possibly be so naive as to how their actions would be perceived.

judge2020 5y ago

Didn't even realize the extent of the referral codes. Imagine if Chrome auto-inserted their own amazon affiliate links when people typed in Amazon.com - people would be up in arms.

vntok 5y ago
Why would people be in arms? Seems like a perfectly fine thing to do. They are literally referring people with buy intent to amazon's deep product pages.
- judge2020 5y ago
  I've since clarified my comment, I meant if Chrome inserted affiliate links, not Google (search). For chrome doing it, the same applies to Brave as those people would have visited binance.us regardless of if Brave inserted their referral code link there.
jonathansampson 5y ago
It's traffic attribution; Brave showed the affiliate option to users via a pre-search UI panel in the browser (screenshot: https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png https://brave.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image3.png). Users could then decide to use the top suggested result, or not. The mistake here was matching on fully-qualified URLs, as opposed to search-input exclusively (the intended behavior). You can read more about it here: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/. No element of this is malicious. As for what others do, traffic attribution is common. Open Firefox and perform a search from the address bar. Long before you press Enter, Firefox has already sent keystrokes off to Google.com (assuming you haven't changed your default search engine), along with a tag on the URL identifying Firefox as the source of the traffic.
- judge2020 5y ago
  The problem is that referral programs are intended to get people who wouldn't have signed up for a site to use it, and for binance that means getting people not already signed up to sign up and trade crypto on binance.us. This includes the referer getting up to 40% of trading fees[0]. Even for the example where a user chooses between the search 'binance' and `binance.us/?ref=`, in both cases they were already planning to visit and/or sign up for the crypto trading site, Brave didn't do any referring themselves. The profit sharing aspect makes it far-removed from the notion of just being for traffic attribution. 0: https://support.binance.us/hc/en-us/articles/360047428793-Referral-Program-Details#:~:text=40%25%20of%20your%20invitee%27s%20trading%20fees https://support.binance.us/hc/en-us/articles/360047428793-Re...

jonathansampson 5y ago

You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong; that isn't the case. Brave is designed in every way to preclude abuse from the design stage, and with a Can't Be Evil mindset, as opposed to the Don't Be Evil of Google. If you have questions about Brave, or Brave Search, we're always happy to chat. - 2018 Rewards Update documented at https://brave.com/rewards-update/ https://brave.com/rewards-update/ - Affiliate Codes explained at https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ - The Tor/DNS issue resulted from https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/ https://brave.com/privacy-updates-6/

tnorthcutt 5y ago
I appreciate the response! I stand by what I said, but I do appreciate you adding your perspective and sharing links so that others can read what Brave as an organization has to say about these incidents.
- jonathansampson 5y ago
  Fair enough; I can respect that :) Always happy to chat if anybody has any other questions about Brave.
judge2020 5y ago
> You make it sound like Brave has intentionally done wrong; They're not saying Brave did anything intentionally wrong, they're just big enough mistakes that it's not possible for them, personally, to trust the organization. > those are enough for me to choose not to trust them as an organization
- howolduis 5y ago
  then what about this?: > On 6 June 2020, a Twitter user pointed out that Brave inserts affiliate referral codes when users type a URL of Binance into the address bar, which earns Brave money. Further research revealed that Brave redirects the URLs of other cryptocurrency exchange websites, too. In response to the backlash from the users, Brave's CEO apologized and called it a "mistake" and said "we're correcting". Seems intentional... Don't insult our intelligence and tell us that this was an "accident" or "unintended mistaken".

pmurt7 5y ago

It's funny seeing all these folks nitpicking at Brave but who are fine using Google or Microsoft every day.

Nicksil 5y ago
>It's funny seeing all these folks nitpicking at Brave but who are fine using Google or Microsoft every day. How do you know this?
Dah00n 5y ago
Citation needed.

annoyingnoob 5y ago

I'm concerned about what happens to data Brave collects when Brave decides to sell itself. At some point they could be attractive to acquire.

jonathansampson 5y ago
Brave doesn't collect user data. We believe in Can't be Evil over Don't be Evil.
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Define 'user data'.
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  To be clear, I only mentioned 'data' generically and not 'user data' specifically. Its clear that Brave Ads collects data, even if you don't consider that data to be user data.
  - jonathansampson 5y ago
    Correct. Data is collected. We detail that data and the privacy-preserving process by which it is collected at https://www.brave.com/p3a/ https://www.brave.com/p3a/. When you consider the type of data collected, it's clear why Brave is still identified as the "most private" browser among leading options: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf. Everything we do is designed for user-privacy and security, first and foremost. No amount of data is worth breaking your trust.
- kup0 5y ago
  Repeating this bumper sticker mantra is honestly consistently unhelpful and comes off smug, IMHO

AzzieElbab 5y ago

I do my best to avoid sarcasm, but but but... have you looked at other players in search?

nextstep 5y ago

Wow, thank you for sharing. I think I’ll stick with Google for now because they’ve never done anything morally questionable.