Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
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If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
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Brave to end 'Strict' fingerprinting protection as it breaks websites (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 113 points 9 months ago (6 children)

There's no reason to hate Brave unless you have a political bias against their CEO.

Besides in 2016, when Brave promised to remove banner ads from websites and replace them with their own, basically trying to extract money directly from websites without the consent of their owners

And when the CEO unilaterally added a fringe, pay-to-win Wikipedia clone into the default search engine list.

And in 2018, Tom Scott and other creators noticed Brave was soliciting donations in their names without their knowledge or consent.

And in 2020, when Brave got caught injecting URLs with affiliate codes when users tried browsing to various websites.

Also in 2020, when they silently started injecting ads into their home page backgrounds, pocketing the revenue. There was a lot of pushback: "the sponsored backgrounds give a bad first impression." Further requests were ignored (immediately closed)

And in 2022, when Brave floated the idea of further discouraging users from disabling sponsored messages.

And in 2023, when Brave got caught installing a paid VPN service on users' computers without their consent.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago

But other than that, there's no reason!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

You're right, no reason at all :)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I had a small mountain of BAT they locked me out of due to shoddy linking with their banking affiliates and out of date DRM practices locking me out of my account due to too many devices being logged in (each OS update counted as its own device).

I noticed you didn't have that linked, that's because not every shitty move a company makes gets news coverage. Sorry I don't fit into your narrow view on what constitutes a valid reason.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If there's something interesting to add to the list, I'm curious. Brave did partner with a criminal organization currently under a $1.1 billion lawsuit, but I don't have enough information about your particular case.

Did the software lock you out or did their servers? Was this reported on anywhere?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

The banking backend that grifted me is called uphold and at the time that was the ONLY way to move BAT out of their wallet.

The device limit was a known issue for years and I left before they fixed it.

While I was still a user I would try their forum for support. Big shocker, LOTS of other users had the same issue and reports got ignored or muted by the mods there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

This made me wonder - is there any active Best Of community on any instance? This would be a perfect candidate.