this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Brave's not the only search engine to do this, but it's just one of a million reasons not to use Brave. They're a scummy company. From this Reddit post:
In 2016, Brave promised to remove banner ads from websites and replace them with their own, basically trying to extract money directly from websites without the consent of their owners
In the same year, CEO Brendan Eich unilaterally added a fringe, pay-to-win Wikipedia clone into the default search engine list.
In 2018, Tom Scott and other creators noticed Brave was soliciting donations in their names without their knowledge or consent.
In 2020, Brave got caught injecting URLs with affiliate codes when users tried browsing to various websites.
Also in 2020, they silently started injecting ads into their home page backgrounds, pocketing the revenue. There was a lot of pushback: "the sponsored backgrounds give a bad first impression."
In 2021, Brave's TOR window was found leaking DNS queries, and a patch was only widely deployed after articles called them out.
In 2022, Brave floated the idea of further discouraging users from disabling sponsored messages.
In 2023, Brave got caught installing a paid VPN service on users' computers without their consent.
Also in 2023, Brave got caught scraping and reselling people's data with their custom web crawler, which was designed specifically not to announce itself to website owners.
In 2024, Brave gave up on providing advanced fingerprint protection, citing flawed statistics (people who would enable the protection would likely disable Brave telemetry).
In 2025, Brave staff publish an article endorsing PrivacyTests and say they "work with legitimate testing sites" like them. This article fails to disclose PrivacyTests is run by a Brave Senior Architect.
YIKES
Thank you