Brave as a company being shady isn’t anything new though. Purely from a privacy standpoint, however, there has never been an indication they have violated users’ trust in that regard. The latest furore you linked is questionable, but nothing to do with privacy.
Still, I personally have very limited trust in the company which is why I don’t use their browser and only rarely use their search.
Their Privacy Policy page seems fairly straightforward to me:
Brave Search is designed to be private by default. We don’t collect personal information about you, your device or your searches. We also don’t transmit information to the web that could be used to profile you or track you or learn anything about you. Your searches are private to YOU.
We temporarily process IP addresses to detect and prevent bots in order to ensure the integrity and availability of the service for all users. IP addresses are not retained but are deleted within seconds.
To me these are clear claims they do not store search terms or IP addresses. Period.
Of course this is what they say. As with any third party search you have to trust they’re doing what they say.
I mean, the article you linked is literally complaining that bullshit sites peddling conspiracies about the moon landing being faked or school shootings being faked are being downranked.
Misinformation being downranked seems to be a major plus to me. 🤷♀️
As with any search engine hosted by someone other than yourself, you essentially have to trust their privacy policy.
DDG’s privacy policy is actually fairly simple:
We don’t save your IP address or any unique identifiers alongside your searches or visits to our websites. We also never log IP addresses or any unique identifiers to disk. This means that when you use our services, we have no way to create a history of your search queries or the sites you browse.
Assuming they’re doing what they say they’re doing, DDG is excellent for privacy.
I personally use DDG, although echo some others that you may have to be a little more specific when searching for some things to get good results. If results aren’t to my liking, I’ll use some other privacy-respecting search engines such as Brave Search and Startpage.
Anyone who was around from the beginnings of the Internet will remember the evolution of ads from basic hyperlinks, to static images, to the period when ad companies realized they could abuse Adobe Flash to serve up the most obnoxious ads possible to try and grab peoples’ attention, while at the same time in some cases attempting to exploit peoples’ browsers to be even more obnoxious, run arbitrary code, or track users aggressively.
No one should feel bad about blocking ads. The people pushing them brought it upon themselves by ramping the annoyance factor up and up and up. Back in the day between the endless pop-ups and Flash ads, the web was barely usable without a good adblocker.
Ads continue to be intrusive to this day, with companies trying all kinds of weird and wonderful ways of tracking you across the web to learn what sites you visit and what you search for. Blocking them is a necessity for anyone conscious of their privacy and security online.
I think this was a good take: ‘Vile’ Titanic submarine memes show social media at its worst
Here’s a fairly comprehensive overview of the Digg situation: https://productmint.com/what-happened-to-digg/
Is the situation with reddit what happened to Digg? Kinda. Digg was a slippery slope of failing to listen to its users and go against the grain of the community, among other things. There’s definitely similarities.
Less is more when it comes to privacy extensions. You only really need UBlock Origin and that’s it. Perhaps CanvasBlocker on FF if not using the Resist Fingerprinting setting, or JShelter if using a Chromium-based browser to fool naive fingerprinting scripts.
I see a bunch of people here still running Decentraleyes etc. when most of the local resources that extension provides are now over 4 years out of date and wouldn’t be used over the newer versions delivered by remote CDNs anyway.
That said, while it is true that adding extensions will change your fingerprint, you’re pretty much uniquely fingerprintable anyway due to a million other data points on a daily driver browser. If you’re seriously looking to avoid being fingerprinted by more advanced fingerprinting scripts, running something like the TOR Browser or Mullvad Browser without changing anything will help since you’ll blend in with anyone else using those very specific configurations.
It once again pains me slightly to be defending this company, as I really do not want people to ignore their questionable business practices when evaluating their trust in them. With that said though, it is important to present correct facts:
Using the EDDM service provided by the USPS that allows blanket mailing of every house within an entire ZIP code does not constitute a “customer list leak.” This is just targeted spam mailing to a ZIP location; Brave don’t even know who they’re sending the mail to. Most likely aren’t Brave users and probably don’t even know about the company, which is the entire point of sending them spam mail I guess.
Your message makes it sound like Brave acquired and printed the names and addresses of Brave customers to send them mail, constituting a leak of their customer list. They didn’t.