Jun 7, 2020

Update on Brave

Only just recently I’ve published my short article about the Brave browser. Today news hit the internet that Brave automatically adds affiliate marketing links to specific domains without properly informing its users:

With Brave as an open source project this is also quite openly visisble in their github repository: https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/357902c33e525a205d5e6590ac22ed4bf9458e06/components/omnibox/browser/suggested_sites_provider_data.cc#L14 However, although being open source nobody seems to have notices until today.

I think that’s a pity for a browser putting such emphasis on privacy, blocking of ads and trackers and - not to forget - a new advertising model with basic attention token. For sure they clearly state and explain their Brave rewards model, but then, would it have hurt them so much to also make a clear statement about their use of affiliate links?

Apparently, a setting for disabling this behaviour already exists, but it defaults to ‘enabled’ in existing releases. In upcoming releases this will be disabled by default:

So please decide for yourself if you want to use Brave or not - and which settings you prefer.