The Brave Browser

From Choose your browser carefully:

"The Brave browser is often recommended by people as a privacy-respecting alternative to both Firefox and Chrome, but this is a mistake. Brave is no better that the alternatives. People are being mislead by the empty promises of privacy. Brave not only also "phones home" but as soon as you fire up the browser it starts contacting Amazon. Brave also hijacks links and insert affiliate codes, which was found out by Cryptonator1337 on Twitter. Furthermore the "anonymously monitoring of user attention" and "rewards publishers accordingly with Basic Attention Token (BAT) crypto currency" is not something that should be recommended.

UPDATE 2021-12-13: Brave have since removed the link hijacking functionality and issued a statement about it on Twitter.

Another privacy issue that was discovered regarding Brave was that clearing the history doesn't remove "Top Sites" on the new tab page.

UPDATE 2021-12-13: This issue was fixed and closed in August 2020.

UPDATE 2022-03-07: The Brave browser is still not a privacy-respecting browser. Should Brave really make good on the promise of respecting privacy, it should not do anything on the Internet unless the user has explicitly told it to so."

From How to choose a web browser for everyday use?:

"This browser has made waves thanks to its built-in privacy protections - such as AdBlock, HTTPS everywhere and script blocking - but in the end, they are outclassed by uMatrix. More than that - after checking them out, I can confidently say the Shields are pretty useless - the vast majority of trackers are left alone; in fact, sometimes it seems that a site can have hundreds of them, and yet none of them will be blocked by the Shields. Script blocking option simply blocks JavaScript fully - it's just NoScript revisited. Brave used to be able to install Chrome extensions only from source, but now does it the same as the other Chrome-based browsers. Despite those, it not only spies on you but is actively working against your privacy by whitelisting Facebook and Twitter trackers. Brave has also been soliciting donations in the name of other people without their consent!"

This article was written on 15/08/2023. If you have any thoughts, feel free to send me an email with them. Have a nice day!