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what do you think of brave (browser)? (linux.community)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

42 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I only use brave at work because it somehow bypasses the firewall there and I can install and use it. I run it to watch videos about cooking or traveling and reading news when I have nothing to do at my job.

At home I usually run tor browser (tbb) and firefox with addons to block ads and tracking.

I'm not sure I should turn to brave as default browser. How do you see it?

what's your experience with brave like?

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Apparently they sell user data to train AI models.. search for "brave controversy"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Apparently you need to follow your own advice and do a search because it takes 30 seconds to see they are collecting data from their search engine not the browser. So if you don't use their search (which is pretty shit anyway) it's not relevant to the browser side of things. The browser is completely open source and everyone can see what the code is doing.

And isn't using search data to improve search results a pretty reasonable usecase for AI? Seems like a nothing burger. For the record I use librewolf but I find the constant Brave hate to be undeserved.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-What-is-the-Web-Discovery-Project-

If you opt in, you’ll contribute some anonymous data about searches and web page visits made within the Brave Browser (including pages arrived at via some, but not all, other search engines). This data helps build the Brave Search independent index, and ensure we show results relevant to your search queries. By “data” we mean search queries, search result clicks, the URLs of pages visited in the browser, time spent on those pages, and some metadata about the pages themselves.

My emphasis.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

So just don't opt in then? They're not selling the data, it's completely optional, and they explain exactly what they're collecting, how they're collecting it, and what they're using it for. This is all completely reasonable. They have to get this information for to improve the search somehow. Even the actual collection component is open source. I'm not sure what the issue is.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

My reply was purely to get to the accurate information versus your reply which says that they are "collecting data from their search engine not the browser" as it's important that people reading know what's actually going on.

I'm not here to argue about whether they should or should not do that and I'm not going to (and when I used Brave I consciously went into the menu to opt into this to improve their search engine so we could have a competitor).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Ahh yeah I actually remember that now that you mention it, I used to be a heavy brave user since then I've moved to ARC, is pretty cool also built on top of chromium just like brave.