marcie (she/her)

I never said it spies on you until you pay the creator. The settings can be tweaked to remove all of that nonsense with simple guides from e.g. privacyguides or similar. Firefox has the same fundamental issue, so its funny that this is some point of consternation.

Surprisingly enough when using the Origin build of brave I saw no measurable difference in fingerprinting artifacts after reviewing the list from EFF’s Cover Your Tracks and browserleaks.com

I haven’t done a really big audit of the two yet to determine their differences in fingerprinting, but ostensibly its a different browser and has a much smaller userbase and it would be harder for you to hide your fingerprint. Linux is an even smaller subsect of a subsect and likely has only maybe a couple thousand users on Linux’s Origin. If you don’t care about that so much and stick to open source websites its not a very big deal if you’re just trying to avoid big tech algorithms.

It is a pretty big browser at this point though. It is also generally more resilient to the shenanigans that websites pull to track you over other browsers due to their hardened containers between tabs. Firefox is a bad choice for this reason alone, the sandboxing is nearly nonexistent, even Tor Browser advises you to stick to one tab only. And for similar reasons, you should never install Brave through Flathub until Flathub-Next fixes the nested containerization issue that tampers with Chromium tab containers (170k people have done so regardless of this).

Brave is a very secure browser with the correct settings. Grapheneos agrees with this take as well and consider it the second most secure chromium browser (though imo vanadium has it’s own shortcomings in regards to AdBlock, brave shields is very effective). Read my other comment for an analysis

I wouldn’t pay for it because that deliberately destroys most privacy benefits. Origin is only worth it on Linux imo. Brave mostly takes advantage of tech illiterate people so the tech literate people can secure their privacy and blend in to a larger crowd. It’s not very ethical but they are the largest privacy browser as a result of being able to afford ad campaigns from this exploitation of illiteracy. I mostly dream of the day that someone forks it and makes it perfect on the backs of all their development money

I don’t really think it’s that simple. They currently have the best security focused AdBlock of any browser (built in rust, default to the browser, works on a higher level than ublock origin, immune to upstream changes like manifest v3, can clear persistent data for specific sites, has containerization modes for changing browser fingerprint on the fly). I’m hoping vanadium or ungoogled chromium (security nightmare btw even though it has no startup telemetry, but I do think it’s an interesting project for learning purposes) eventually adds brave shields to their browsers. The default settings aren’t great but the right settings config clears out all potential telemetry and phoning home.

For what it’s worth, the grapheneos team agrees with me and considers brave to be the second best chromium browser after vanadium for security purposes 🤷‍♀️