It's equally frustrating to me that some people don't seem to realize that you can opt-out (once, at initial setup) and have a completely ad-free experience.

It's the same kind of iterative creep of compromises on privacy that initially raised alarms with Mozilla, which culminated in Mozilla's "don't be evil" moment (or, their, erm, not-"don't be evil" moment).

You can opt out now while they are trying to gain market share. Honestly everyone on here should know this game by now. There is no such thing as "free" product made by a for-profit corporation.

That's what a lot of us have. Brave's own ad systems are opt-in, and a majority of users don't opt-in. It's a minority that are interested in the crypto features. I just left the crypto stuff off, hid the icons and have a degoogled Chromium with strong adblock and some nice quality of life extras.