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Why you shouldn't use Brave Browser (www.spacebar.news)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 108 points 3 years ago* (5 children)

At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see. Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave, and that's what's wrong in general with the "but the UX is so nice" mentality.

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  • [–] 53 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave

    It starts to feel astroturfed at a certain point. The last week or so has been crazy.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

    At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see.

    To be clear, that means Brave is ① invading their users' privacy, and ② stealing money from web publishers.

    The point of referral codes is to reward web publishers for referring users to a product; leading to the user buying a product that they otherwise wouldn't.

    Your browser isn't introducing you to a product. For it to insert referral codes for the browser vendor's benefit is stealing money.

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  • [+] -11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    If you really dig into the whole ordeal it was a software error, not some malicious idea to steal links from creators.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

    How exactly does one accidentally insert affiliate data on links? At some point someone wrote that code, which is malicious in itself, even if the activation was accidental.

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  • [+] -23 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    What’s so bad about that?

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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    It's without your consent.

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  • [+] -25 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Most of the stuff that happens on the backend of any software goes on "without your consent".

    You clicked on a webpage.

    You were brought to that webpage.

    You weren't tracked, logged, or had your data exploited or anything. All that happened was Brave got an affiliate bonus.

    Now if the companies in question were angry at Brave for doing that, I could understand. But why should we, the users, give a shit?

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    You weren’t tracked, logged, or had your data exploited or anything. All that happened was Brave got an affiliate bonus.

    You seem to not know how affiliate links work. The products shopped are tracked & logged per user, and can be analyzed by the affiliate partner as to what their users were buying, i.e. data can be exploited.

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  • [+] -8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I don't know a lot, so maybe you know more than me. The tracking and logging is via cookies, right?

    The same cookies that brave automatically blocks?

    Again, maybe they do some tracking via some other method that I don't know about; I'm not an expert. But it seems to me that Brave was essentially scamming those companies by using their referral codes but denying them any useful data. Great for brave, sucks for the companies, shouldn't matter to us.

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