Brave, the false sensation of privacy
Breaking this response up into a few comments:<p>&quot;Their adblocker is just a fork of uBlock Origin…&quot;<p>Claims like this should be supplemented with links to our source code (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.brave.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.brave.com</a>), if true. I&#x27;m not sure what gave the author this impression; Brave&#x27;s built-in ad-blocking <i>does use public lists</i> in addition to our own efforts, but that isn&#x27;t the same as being a fork of uBlock Origin. That being said, uBO is a fine extension, and you should definitely be using it (if you&#x27;re not using Brave).<p>&quot;They’re whitelisting trackers from Facebook and Twitter, so they can use scripts in third parties&#x27; websites to track you across the web.&quot;<p>This is also quite misleading. It stems from a claim made back in 2018 about our <i>now-retired</i> &quot;Muon&quot; build of Brave. We had a file which listed third-party scripts which shouldn&#x27;t be blocked (so as not to &quot;break the Web&quot;). Among these were particular Facebook and Twitter scripts, because Facebook and Twitter content is embedded all throughout the Web (think of embedded Tweets, posts, videos, etc.). As such, it&#x27;s important to permit this content to load, but to prevent it from utilizing any persistent storage (e.g. cookies). Not only were these scripts prevented to accessing storage, Brave also modified or discarded the referrer header on these request. This wasn&#x27;t ever a case of &quot;whitelisting trackers&quot;.<p>&quot;They’re blatantly lying to their users. Anyone who knows a bit about how JavaScript…&quot;<p>Responding to a previous explanation for the &quot;whitelist&quot;, the author emphatically claims the engineers at Brave don&#x27;t understand how JavaScript works. If I&#x27;m not mistaken, the author is responding to Brendan Eich (Brave&#x27;s CEO), who happens to also be *the creator of JavaScript*.<p>&quot;Another problem with their built-in adblocker is that it’s better for extensions to be separated from the core of the browser, since they don’t follow each other’s update cycles. This means that you need to update the entire browser to fix a bug in the adblocker. Stupid, isn’t it?&quot;<p>Agreed, which is why Brave&#x27;s ad-blocking logic is broken out into a distinct component. You can see it enumerated on brave:&#x2F;&#x2F;components, and even request updates from that page as well. It would have been very unwise to require a full browser update just to deliver updates to ad-blocking rules, etc.<p>&gt; Note: By this point, it should be clear to the reader that the author is unqualified to conduct such a review. A cursory review of Brave&#x27;s source (both in the archived &#x27;Muon&#x27; repo and our active code.brave.com endpoint) would have answered many of their questions. A review of Brave&#x27;s network activity, such as the one I conducted this year (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brave.com&#x2F;popular-browsers-first-run&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brave.com&#x2F;popular-browsers-first-run&#x2F;</a>), would have addressed many claims to follow.<p>&quot;It’s important to bring focus to the fact that Brave isn’t more than Chromium with another skin and a built-in adblocker with reduced functionality.&quot;<p>Wrong, again. Brave is a heavily patched version of Chromium, deviating in many ways (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brave&#x2F;brave-browser&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;brave&#x2F;brave-browser&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Deviations-from-...</a>) from the base project. Again, this would have been quite clear to the author if they compared the network activity of Chrome and Brave (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brave.com&#x2F;popular-browsers-first-run&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brave.com&#x2F;popular-browsers-first-run&#x2F;</a>).<p>&quot;Rewards is their shitty program that will replace ads displayed on websites with their own.&quot;<p>Another easily-disproven claim, showing the author likely has never used Brave. Brave *does not replace ads on websites*. Brave&#x27;s Ad system is opt-in, user-configurable, and displays ad notifications as <i>native system notifications</i>. These appear as prompts on your desktop or screen, outside of the browser itself.<p>&quot;…they’re tracking you with Rewards…&quot;<p>Again, where is the network analysis or source code to substantiate this claim? The author doesn&#x27;t provide anything, because it&#x27;s simply not true. Brave Rewards is designed to preclude tracking. Rather than having user data flow out to remote servers (the way Google Ads and more work today), Brave Rewards keeps the user&#x27;s data on their device, and routinely downloads a regional ad catalog. This inverts the traditional digital advertising model. I covered this system in a bit more detail recently in a 5-minute talk on the history of digital advertising, and how Brave is fixing the industry. You can watch that talk at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LsrrT502luI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=LsrrT502luI</a>.<p>Continued below...