Technology

Yep, this news actually broke a couple days ago, I remember seeing a Brave fanboy having a meltdown over it and ranting about how Mozilla is the real shady company, blah, blah, blah.

I've actually been attacked on several occasions by brave fan boys when I casually mentioned that I switched to Firefox and loved it. Idk what their deal is but I find it hilarious that all this stuff is coming out about brave recently 🤣

Firefox is great.

I'm team Firefox, very happy here. There's a small amount of optional telemetry to disable to maximise your privacy, and it has the best plugins because there's a lot of choice and they're not purposely crippled.

Firefox and Mull (a Firefox fork) have your privacy in mind. They work as good as Chrome and don't fuck you without asking.

I don't like Brave because they've done dodgy things like this time and time again over the years, and each time Brandon Eich went on a marketing campaign across social media to drum up new users and drown the story out.

But what's wrong with non Chrome Chromium based browsers?

(Just give me downvotes, I don't care if my question is stupid)

Brave browser has been automatically installing VPN services on Windows computers without user consent, but it remains inactive unless the user subscribes.

They're installing extra software that's useless unless you give them money. Plus you really want to be aware of your VPN since all your traffic will be going through it.

Because a vpn can monitor all the websites that you visit. Not directly what you're looking at, but definitely where you're looking. Just line your provider can, if you're not using a vpn. But at least with your provider, you have a contract with them - you pay them to transport your data and nothing more. Some very scummy providers aside, that's where it stops.

A free vpn, however, needs to pay for transporting your data somehow. And if you're not paying for it with money, then who/what is?

See also Tom Scott's explanation about vpns, why you probably don't need one, and why he refused their advertisement money.

I agree with what other people said. And here's a new twist.

Any software that messes with the networking stack, can cause really difficult to debug errors. And it may induce errors in other programs. The more complicated your computer's networking, the more fragile it is.

So introducing, silently, unasked for, network drivers and VPN hooks into the operating system is harming the compute stability of their user base.

At the very least, it should be opt-in! There should be a dialogue asking hey we have this new awesome feature, click okay to install it, something like that. Informed consent

It's "all your mail is now redirected to a third party that makes money by mining it for data without you knowing" level of nastiness. Absolutely deplorable and a reason to never touch anything made by the people behind Brave even with a ten foot pole. Brave is a scam and why people pretend its not is beyond me.

Probably because nobody cares about Opera doing that since the ones pointing this out are at least privacy aware people that won't use Opera. It is also a problem when Brave does it because it is a "privacy focused" browser. They sure have the balls to do this.