The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

I never understood why anyone would use Brave, the payouts are small, the utility of the crypto is zero, and watching/seeing adverts is a nightmare. I honestly believe that blocking all advertising and sending a small monetary amount to someone providing value is a better way of supporting the people you care about.

Brave is just too shady and I hate that it's considered a "privacy" browser by people who don't know better.

Tried it for a week or two, but since I reinstalled Firefox I really don't understand why I was judging/hating so much in the past years. Yes, Chrome/ium used to be waaaay faster, but Mozilla just has their shit together most of the time. The Debian of browsers so to speak.

Their crypto autofill scandal is all one needs to know about this company. If you're marketing your browser as privacy focused and then pull stunts like that you lose all credibility in my eyes. Forever.

Firefox or go bust

That’s why i use Firefox.

After their crypto crap, this doesn't surprise me one bit.

And don't give me that "You can disable the crypto" the fact is, you shouldn't have to because it shouldn't have ever been included in the first place.

One of the founders, Brendan Eich, donated his money to take away the equal right for same-sex couples to marry in California (Prop 8). He never acknowledge that it was mistake, so I can only assume that he truly wants to see the marriages of same-sex couples erased, which is quite a hateful thing to desire.

Everyone knows the only safe way to browse is to scrape webpages and print the content to your terminal.

Firefox users: Another Chromium drama? People never learn

I will never understand why people dont just use firefox and its derrivatives...

Your post just links to its own icon. Did you have an article to link to instead?

Didn't they do some shady stuff before too? I was pretty confused why some people still recommended it

To me Firefox is the best browser.

I use Chrome because I'm lazy to move, I have my stuff synced in there and I use it also with my phone (Google Pixel). But lately I'm considering Firefox more and more. At least I now have it installed in my phone and specifically use it for some stuff.

It started with widgets showing crypto currency markets.

I immediately noped the hell off it.

TL;DR: Brave Software has their HQ in California and they are they're stealing data and selling it and giving "rights" to other people. Lawsuits are probably already being filed by multiple companies come monday.

And it's not in an "our AI 'read' the page and is making their own", it's straight up taking entire sentences and almost entire paragraphs from places like wikipedia and selling them as original data without attribution(which is required by the license used by wikimedia/pedia)

LOL, about half the points in the article are struck through now. Yet another "journalist" who doesn't understand how anything works getting angry how they way they imagine it works.

That's some quality reporting "stackdiary".

Yea within no time Brave will become evil as hell because the CEO is a silicon valley bro. They just waiting for more people to adapt their product and services.

I can't and won't ever understand why people keep recommending Brave. This is not even the second or third shady shit they pull off.

I was a big Brave supporter back in 2019-2020 when it seemed to have a lot of momentum behind it. But they squandered any goodwill they had with their crypto add-ons and rewards

Why is everyone mixing search engines and browsers here? This is specifically about the search engine and the problems that api of the search engine has with respecting copyright laws. I use their search engine and dont use their browser

Every single one of these Brave "scandals" are so irrelevant and meaningless. I was hoping the reddit hive mind wouldn't be brought over to lemmy, but here we are.

This article, especially after the update from Brave, seems like a huge nothing-burger. Just another excuse for the Firefox Fanatics crowd to rag on Brave and circlejerk each other about how good Firefox is.

The article isn't even about Brave Browser, and it has nothing to do with user data. The website owner is mad that Brave Search is crawling their site and using data in their "Summarizer" feature. I thought Firefox users were supposed to be against the Google internet monopoly, but apparently when it comes to one of the only companies with their own independent and actually decent search engine, they don't seem to care anymore because of stupid "Firefox good brave bad" browser wars nonsense.

That's pretty dumb. Brave is looking for any and every monetisation opportunity. Can't blame them, with competition having free browsers, but it doesn't exactly make them trustworthy.

Someone please make a fork of Brave without the nonsense?

Been using brave for a few years on mobile and desktop.

They uses to give away BAT, but they have refined their system to not give any unless you spend hours jumping through hoops and linking shoddy Chinese financial apps and crypto wallets.

I still use it for the privacy, but after reading this I will likely switch back to firefox or another chrome based browser.

I tried Brave for a couple days but I kept getting notifications from it that were ads. Brave had to go.

I never liked Brave. I don't care for the crypto crap they add onto their browser

Did nobody read the article? The author is crying that Brave implemented a summary feature so users don't have to read through entire paragraphs to get to the actual content. Of course, he goes on and on about copyright and OpenAI, nothing really about user data.

Firefox forever.

I never really liked brave to begin with, I feel safer implementing my privacy myself, and I think gecko just can do it better.

So few browsers left that support privacy

Damn. Who knew that Brendan Eich was a shady pos.

seem like a good place to shill my blog about switching browser and search engine. I recommend Librewolf on desktop and Mull on android tho. view this privacy comparison. For search engine, use StartPage, Whoogle (privacy frontend for Google) or SearXNG (search engine aggregator)

Librewolf is king, it's baeicalky Firefox with a little hardening and good defaults!

As I user, how does this impact me?

... Looks like it's time to switch browsers again. Anyone got any suggestions? Preferably a Chromium-based privacy-focused browser without any crypto-related bells and whistles. And it has to be able to sync between Android and desktop.

happy firefox user for over 5 years now, glad i will never use chromium trash like this

I'm geniunely asking, what are the alternatives that are fast, have builtin sync, and can block ads on android? I've tried firefox, and while it's gotten better on desktop, in my experience it struggles to play youtube videos on mobile, and the ui is basically unusable on a tablet/foldable.

Aw man I just started using Brave on my Android phone and really enjoy using it's AdBlock features and forced dark mode on pages that don't support it yet.

I tried Firefox and they didn't have an option to force dark mode on webpages without me having to turn this in in developer mode which breaks other apps I use.

never used that "Brave" and never will

Switch to librewolf

Can anyone recommend a good alternative that works well under Linux and block ads and trackers well? In particular YouTube ads?

Vivaldi ftw. The only Chromium browser I trust and use.

I’m not using their browser in part because of all the problems of the past, but the search engine is actually really good. In my case it’s better than DDG and bing.

I like Brave. Should I stop? 😋 Guess I should look a Vivaldi again

I would use firefox but more and more websites require a specific browser technology or even a specific browser.

I use Firefox with arkenfox's user.js on my laptop. For android I use bromite, and update it via F-Droid.

So glad Puffin killed itself... Why does everything good have to go away?

I am not useng Brave much as of recently, except for maybe mobile because of UWP apps. Firefox has become really fast in recent versions, and even when I have 8 extensions on, it still opens pages in a breeze. And it is more customizable than most of the other browsers. I do however like DDG Browser's minimalism and use of WebKit, so if I want a very minimal browser with barely any extras whatsoever that respects my privacy, I go to DDG Browser.

honestly; there are no browers left that produce fast, good results that also respect your privacy. Its a compromise with every option these days. I've given up and went with bing on firefox because it gives good results

Vivaldi is so much better without crypto.

I like chromium. It's there no way I can enjoy the best of both worlds?

Oh man this is awesome thank you so much!!

from my experience & tests brave is better for blocking fingerprinting without having a bunch of exensions. witch the extensions themselves would make browsers more unique and identifyable

Dammit now I have no good choice for a browser on Android. https://divestos.org/pages/browsers https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

Edit: OK, I think I'll use this from now on, basicially the continuation of Bromite: https://github.com/uazo/bromite-buildtools

finally this fucking, shady and useless brave shits out of the jar

FF add blockers kept failing me, got sick of it and switches brave a while ago, use it on my phone and tablet too. It works for me. Because Google won't sell my data, I'm not that worried about what brave is doing.

I've been using Brave for over a year now and really like it. Nearly all the functionality of Chrome with none of the privacy issues.

I went from Chrome to FireFox back to Chrome and now to Brave. Brave has actually made me miss Firefox a bit. I'm going to stick with Brave a bit though, I like the Tor functionality and the Wallet function feels useless. I'm not too sure how secure having a copy of your COLD Wallet is on your browser. Additionally, I've been looking into Nord VPN that I also completely passed over the integrated VPN functionality as well.

F me. Other comments, in particular about the dev, making me hurl.

Only used its Private mode tho. Never went into its crypto shit.

If only Firefox [LibreWolf] wasn't so dogshit when I open multiple Youtube tabs on Private mode, then I'll migrate my tabs there.

Edit: seems people here never tried doing that on ther LibreWolf smh. Don't worry, I'll change my mind when LW's private mode don't give me the problem anymore.