this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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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.
It starts to feel astroturfed at a certain point. The last week or so has been crazy.
I would bet my left nut they astroturf
They're cryptocurrency scammers; do you expect them not to hustle?
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.
Its almost like UX is one of the most important things for a user of any given program. 🥴
If you really dig into the whole ordeal it was a software error, not some malicious idea to steal links from creators.
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.
It's also strange that it happened twice, first with amazon links, then they started injecting affiliate data for crypto platforms instead.
It’s possible they had ads with referrals but accidentally modified all amazon links
What’s so bad about that?
It's without your consent.
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?
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.
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.
Not necessarily via cookies. The referral links can be unique to a specific user.
Why the fuck should your browser get a share from your amazon shopping? It’s doubly galling since they pretend to care about user privacy.