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> "they get caught on very hostile things again and again" This is not the case. The most common claims are "Brave accepted donations for others", "Brave repla
by jonathansampson 5y ago
> "they get caught on very hostile things again and again"
This is not the case. The most common claims are "Brave accepted donations for others", "Brave replaces ads across the Web", "Brave injected/modified referral links"—each of these claims are unequivocally false.
You are right that Brave is an "ad based company," however. But that needs to be explained a bit, since Brave is unlike any other ad-based company you've likely encountered on the Web.
When people think of "ad-based company," they often picture something like Google. A company that has its hands in most of what you do on the Web, existing as a third-party resource in most of your traffic.
But compare Brave with Google for a moment. Brave's ad-model is consent based, while Google's is not. Brave's model follows the user's configuration for determining how often/whether ads should be shown, while Google does not. Brave's model pays the user 70% of the associated revenue, while Google does not. Brave collects [no user data], while Google does the opposite. The Brave model is built on consent, equity, and privacy. Google's model is the opposite, in every regard.
- nicce 5y ago> This is not the case. The most common claims are "Brave accepted donations for others", "Brave replaces ads across the Web", "Brave injected/modified referral links"—each of these claims are unequivocally false. How so? For example the case "Brave injected/modified referral links" https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/components/omnibox/browser/suggested_sites_provider_data.cc#L14 https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/master/components/o... The "problem" of open-source is, that you can see what is happening.
- jonathansampson 5y agoNo problem here; I'm happy you went straight to the source. You can also find this code at code.brave.com in the future (to save you some clicks). Note that the source to which you linked does not demonstrate Brave "injecting" or "modifying" any referral links. What is shown instead is our affiliate-code offering, which is presented in the UI of the browser itself when the participating user searches particular terms via the ominibox. We wrote about this here, including screenshots of how it appears in-app: https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/ https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
- nicce 5y agoBut that is exactly what injection is. But anyway I'm glad you fixed it.
- jonathansampson 5y agoInjection refers to content inserted into a page from outside. An example of this would be Brave's "tip" buttons on Twitter. The browser [injects] an object into the page which can trigger tipping UI in the browser when clicked. This feature didn't inject anything; it displayed an affiliate-link option in the browser's interface. Others have claimed that Brave modified referral codes; this too is false. While some sites have attempted this as a support option (Stack Overflow briefly considered/experimented-with modifying Amazon links in questions/answers, but chose not to continue down that path), Brave never engaged in this type of behavior. This claim implies that Brave has modified the DOM of pages viewed by the user to alter the HREF of links to various sites. This is not the case, and never was the case either. Brave simply had a short list of affiliate codes which could be presented to the user, if they matched the user's search input, as a way of supporting development of the project. No network activity involved, no data exchanged, no modifying visited pages or anything else. It was presented merely as a pre-search suggestion when relevant to the user's input.
- nicce 5y ago> Injection refers to content inserted into a page from outside. An example of this would be Brave's "tip" buttons on Twitter. The browser [injects] an object into the page which can trigger tipping UI in the browser when clicked. This feature didn't inject anything; it displayed an affiliate-link option in the browser's interface. That is a one meaning for the injection. In this case, you injected HTTP GET parameters (referrals) for the domain URL suggestion which was written by the user. And that you can of course call only as "a pre-search suggestion", but in reality user had to remove them by hand/typing the whole url in that time to not use them, as it was injected into the url.