3 ms·
Given the company's colorful history of mishandling data and abusing user trust, it also seems like a general scapegoat CYA for their own use, too.
by drusepth 5y ago
Given the company's colorful history of mishandling data and abusing user trust, it also seems like a general scapegoat CYA for their own use, too.
- prepend 5y agoI wasn’t aware of this and thought Brave had a good record. Where can I learn more about their mishandling of data and abuse of user trust?
- drusepth 5y agoIt's admittedly hard to find non-biased takes on their history because everyone seems to have a love/hate relationship with them, but here's a couple things off the top of my head that might give searchable terms: * Inserting their own affiliate links into URLs you visit (now removed) * Their implementation of Tor didn't actually work; leaked your browsing activity (now fixed) * Received BAT donations on behalf of creators without notifying donators whether creators had opted-in to receive donations or not, and without notifying creators that they even had donations unless they reached a certain $ threshold (donations are now returned to users after a set time unless creators opt in to Brave's rewards platform) * Similarly, they used to scrape site creators' socials (twitter, youtube, etc) to use their images/details in the donation CTA a la shadow profiles (now removed) * They require Uphold to "cash out" earned BAT, which has a ton of their own controversies around freezing/deleting accounts when people try to withdraw a majority of their wallet (AFAIK still an issue) There's plenty of others that inevitably get brought up in most threads about Brave. Most have been fixed after complaints/callouts, but employee reactions to getting called out are usually to the tune of "sorry you're surprised, but it's legal for us to do" instead of "we're sorry we did XYZ without telling you; we'll remove it".