Dns leaks are bad but Brave never was a serious anonymity browser. Just as Firefox never was and Firefox had many real ip behind proxy leaks as well. Firefox also never intendedly prevented dns leaks because it just takes system settings or specific doh settings. Its a dishonest comparison. Still their tor mode is a joke.
The referral tags aren't a big thing. They are fixed strings that are the same for every user. They do not identify anyone other than as Brave user, which is trivial anyway due to user agent and fingerprinting. Do you remember that Firefox back in the day did the same when it was underdog? If it makes them money,thats a very privacy and intrusion inexpensive way of getting that.
Ad replacement is opt-in only and an actually interesting concept to try fix the spying third party to everything issue. If its not on ads are just blocked.
Pocketing money from the Ad-view rewards if not claimed. I can't tell if they are actually pocket or just wait for registration of $creator. How else would they do it? They can't magically find out their bank account.
You say they grab donations? Like they actually replace Donation buttons in sites by their own? I haven't heard of that.I only know that you can pay into a Brave Wallet and distribute it to signed up creators. But you have to explicitly pay into Brave and its likely to have read how it works on the way to that. Have a source?
Whitelisting Facebook/Twitter tracking? They had a setting for that in main settings. Is it gone? Else give a source or decrypted pcap please.
Last time I checked telemetry code (early 2020) there really wasn't anything interesting to correlate in there.
KYC for using Brave Wallet breaks the whole vision of the ad replacement thingy. Ack. I hate it.
Most modified Firefox builds are extra buggy or make an easy to match browser fingerprint change that makes you unique. Icecat is severely broken. Waterfox can't keep up with releases. More... I use my distros build with custom settings and disabled backchannels.
I dont use Brave because their release management is garbage and their team is kinda opaque.
They don't. There was some confusion about things initially, but no BAT leaves a user's machine unless the creator the BAT is assigned to signs up.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181221180137if_/https://twitte...
Brave put a "donate to this person" button on creator content, took donations of cryptocurrency on that person's behalf, and then pocketed the crypto if the creator didn't register for Brave's program.
Are there others than Tom Scott claiming this?
Are there underhanded motivations propable on Tom Scott's side against BraveBrowser or the other way around?
My motivation? Wanting a browser that is actually pro-user.
If BraveBrowser (wont ever use brave as adjective there) used their platform to do underhanded tactics against people that didn't attack first than this would be interesting and a reason to toss any thought about using it. I don't see a trend there yet. More sources? I crave.
I'd love if Mozilla got their shit together but I am not seeing it coming.
Before making a claim like this, perhaps you could google Tom Scott, a well-known YouTuber who is frequently linked on HN.
The incident in question is covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
* DNS leaks in VPN mode that were reported to them and fixed in nightly builds but not pushed to a public build until the issue attracted attention in social media
* inserting referral codes into numerous URLs (most of them cryptocurrency related). They've shifted to silently inserting headers when you hit partner websites that identify you as a Brave browser user
* removing ads from sites to put its own ads in place of them
* collecting "donations" on content creator's pages, without notice or consent...and pocketing the money if the creator doesn't "claim" the donations
* whitelisting Facebook, Twitter, and other tracking
* telemetry that cannot be disabled, that includes "non-personally-identifying" usage data
* collecting Brave Rewards program crypto-tokens requires providing extensive personal information to their crypto-wallet partners and "may" require fucking biometric verification and authorizing sharing that data with an facial-recognition-based ID verification service.
Just use one of the modified builds of Firefox, like Librefox, if you want greater privacy than what Firefox provides out of the box.