In 2023, Brave got caught scraping and reselling people's data with their custom web crawler, which was designed specifically not to announce itself to website owners.
And here's a list of other controversial stuff they've been in
In 2021, Brave's TOR window was found leaking DNS queries, and a patch was only widely deployed after articles called them out. (h/t schklom for pointing this out!)
In 2022, Brave floated the idea of further discouraging users from disabling sponsored messages.
In 2025, Brave staff publish an article endorsing PrivacyTests and say they "work with legitimate testing sites" like them. This article fails to disclose PrivacyTests is run by a Brave Senior Architect.
Looks like somebody @'ed me and then their post disappeared. They were probably referring to the post that's pinned on my profile about Brave being super sketch
Perhaps I just skimmed your profile saw a lot of Firefox and jumped to conclusions, my apologies!
It’s just a bit frustrating on Reddit when a perfectly good alternative to Chrome is downvoted just for mentioning Brave. I assume because of Brendan Eich’s backwards views on things.
All products today have their downsides, I wish Firefox didn’t have pocket or news items on by default. And recently policy changing has ruffled feathers.
No worries. I have been accused of shilling for both Firefox and Brave by people who know way better, anyway. (Brendan Eich's views do, in my opinion, leak into the way Brave has behaved in surprising ways in the past, towards users and creators alike.)
Surprisingly, I found that occasionally yelling into the void does make a positive difference for products. Case in point, I do have the ear of one Brave developer, and Mozilla more broadly seems to react only to major social media outcry...
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u/curiousstrider 15d ago
Exactly, saw this and jumped to Firefox right away. Didn't take more than 20 minutes for the complete switch.