←back to thread

Brave taking cryptocurrency donations “for me” without my consent

(twitter.com)
323 points plusCubed | 1 comments | 21 Dec 18 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
aphextron ◴[21 Dec 18 19:26 UTC] No.18735814[source]▶
I'd been really loving Brave and using it as my daily driver for a few months now, until that I noticed that little "Brave Ads" icon at the end of the address bar. That's when I realized their entire business model is just in the usurpation of existing Google ad revenue, dressed up with "privacy concerns" for the good PR. This sent me on a journey to find a really solid, free, Chromium based browser that is totally de-Googled, which seems absolutely impossible. I've tacitly settled on Vivaldi, but it's just impossible to really know if they are trustworthy as a company in the long run. Ultimately I feel like I can only trust a browser who's entire build process is open source at this point.
replies(10): >>18735832 #>>18735914 #>>18735978 #>>18736019 #>>18736112 #>>18736356 #>>18736482 #>>18736485 #>>18737438 #>>18748391 #
1. rhlsthrm ◴[23 Dec 18 21:18 UTC] No.18748391[source]▶
Honestly, if you're running a Mac, your rationale seems to point to using Safari as your browser. I had a similar thought process as you, and Apple's incentives as a company seem to align best with mine. Apple's incentive with Safari is to make your user experience of running on Apple products better, to keep you in the ecosystem. Apple has taken a hard stance on exposing, collecting, and sharing user data, and although some of their AI suffers from this (i.e. Siri), their stance is something I can get behind.

Apple seems like the only company that builds a browser that is not incentivized to collect ad revenue. I've been using Safari for everything for the past few weeks, and really liking it. The performance on Apple hardware seems better too, and there are some cool Apple ecosystem features built in. I'm a web developer so there are certain things I still need Chrome for, but in those cases I fire up a single Chrome tab and use Safari for everything else.