A crypto company turns out to be shady? Who would have thought!

Yes exactly. This is just yet another of Brave's long history of controversial moves.

Typically, these have been followed by the CEO going on a marketing campaign. The new users drown out the controversy.

ye first time i heard about brave was in a sponsor segment on a youtube video, my first thoughts were "lol another chromium browser? rewards? bar? ok this seems shady as hell" and sure enough it is indeed shady af. the Tor mode had DNS leaks way back (besides who in their right mind would even use tor in a chromium browser), URL injections, brave not giving out BAT, also them spam mailing Brave pamphlets to customers (physical mail too, it was through i think UPS, which idk if that's technically considered a privacy violation, but to me, mailing someone a pamphlet out of the blue when you use their browser without your consent is quite literally a privacy violation, no matter where you got the data from or how you mailed it).

been gladly using firefox ever since version 3, best browser of all time.

Honestly it shocks me that people are surprised by this.

Any free product that also claims to be more privacy friendly is lying. In fact, if you want to farm the data of the group of people who are harder to track because they care about privacy... Launching a Chromium browser with a fancy skin and spending 80% of your money astroturfing online so "users" can "recommend" your "privacy friendly" browser everywhere is quite literally the best strategy.

How exactly were they known to be shady?

Just use Firefox, it's always been the best out of them for Privacy

Brave’s been super shady its entire existence. They’ve been caught linkjacking and accepting “donations” for websites that don’t have accounts (so theft via fraud).

Install Firefox (also works on mobile!), add uBlock Origin (also available on mobile!), done.

The browser is fine. Nobody seems to have read the article. It’s about their search engine. It doesn’t have anything to do with privacy, instead it’s about copyright infringement.

I’m not sure why this was even posted here. Maybe OP didn’t read the article either.

I was suspicious as soon as I saw it runs on Chromium. I can safely assure you, Google is not focusing on privacy features there.

yeah, it is such a pain 😥. but hardened firefox 😏

This is data scraped from websites for the brave search engine, not data from browser users

Someone tried to do it a few years back and either got threatened with a lawsuit or actually got sued by Brave because of it. The browser was called Braver; you can look it up!

The Brave browser is billed as an ad-blocking, privacy protecting, champion of the everyday internet user.

We know they’re not, but they openly masquerade as one and so when they do something shady it’s somewhat relevant to put them on blast yet again. Just look at all the people in this thread alone that are like “oh wtf Brave isn’t good for privacy?”

I mean I’m sorry you’re not learning anything new from this content but we should probably be happy others are.

Brave Search and Brave Browser are both products of the same company, Brave Software, Inc.

DDG is miles ahead of Brave. But the company behind it has a deal with MS to feed them user data. They're transparent about it and the motivation isn't nefarious. But still, it's a thing. Now obviously, FF has deal with google, so I guess it's more of a "pick your poison" situation