Malware targeting individuals rather than servers do not need privilege escalation. They just need to run as the user and swipe cookies/credentials/wallets etc. Privilege escalation would allow them to do catastrophic damage but that's not the point in that case.
slackness
If you don't trust an extension then you shouldn't install it in the first place. If you think an extension might be nefarious, trying to work around that by limiting its internet connection is risky.
majority of unixporn posts are people copy pasting premade hyprland configs so..
How dare those people make and release software for free but don't dedicate more of their time to me!
Browsers allow websites to have persistent storage apart from cookies.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_API
The user not having a choice is dumb either way. VPN users are the minority.
Browsers (except for Tor) doing this in the name of privacy is so dumb. Our timezones are already apparent due to our IP addresses. Not only does this not hide the timezone but also makes the user more fingerprintable. Now I'm the dumbass from Ohio who's browser reports UTC timezone for some reason.
I gave you the real reason it should be controversial. Brave's fuck ups have not been significantly worse than other companies'.
re: open source In theory: yes. In practice: maybe. It'll probably eventually be caught by some researcher but unlike popular belief all open source code bases are not constantly being audited by the community. A random person can't just read Brave source code for all platforms and accurately gauge if they're doing something nefarious. It is very easy to hide stuff in code or misuse a protocol for evil purposes, etc.
You can modify the source code but as evident by the fact that there's no Brave fork with crypto removed (there was one but their branding was too similar to Brave's so they got sued), it's not an easy feat to maintain that.
Running those adblockers on your devices is extremely insecure. They register as a VPN and intercept HTTPS traffic. They decrypt the encrypted traffic, filter it, and encrypt again meaning all your communications are signed by this single app's certificate. Not to mention any vulnerability would wreak havoc.
It's backed by Peter Thiel who is a war mongering Nazi billionaire.
In most "free" countries digitally cracking or cloning phones or trying to scare the owner to unlock as well as remote exploitation is legal. Beating people up in interrogation rooms isn't. Either way, GOS has a panic mode that will immediately erase the phone in a cryptographically secure fashion.