Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of “AI” stuff, but come on, one of these isn’t even in English, and that’s what I have my language set to.
Been trying to get away from DuckDuckGo because of their support of “AI” stuff, but come on, one of these isn’t even in English, and that’s what I have my language set to.
I’ll just leave this here: https://thelibre.news/no-really-dont-use-brave/
Several useless slop paragraphs in that article - seems to have been written by LLM.
Human summary: Brave is a Chromium-based browser that is recommended by some for privacy. It’s created by homophobe and Republican donor Brendan Eich, who was asked by several Mozilla employees to resign and led to half of Mozilla’s board to step down. After OKCupid started pointing out his homophobia to Mozilla browsers users, he finally quit.
After that he created Brave with millions of dollars from amongst others Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.
In 2016 the “Brave Ad Replacement” was announced which would replace ads on pages with ones injected by Brave, paying in crypto.
Brave collected donations in their crypto on behalf of people like Tom Scott without asking them, and when Tom found out and told Brave to stop, Brave said “refunds are impossible”.
In 2020 Brave Browser silently injected referral links into URLs of crypto wallets containing Brave’s affiliate code.
By default they display sponsored images as the background for the home and new tab pages.
In 2021 Brave Browser exposed the .onion domains people visited as part of the DNS traffic so their ISPs could track users.
In 2023 Brave announced that they’d be selling their search data to AI companies, and prevented sites from opting out of this even if they asked not to be scraped by Brave.
In 2024 Brave deprecated their option for Strict fingerprinting protection.
Brave also paid for advertisement whenever users searched for “Firefox” in the Play Store, displaying “Forget the Fox”, which Brave’s VP (who promoted NFTs and FTX with AI) denied - meaning he was lying or didn’t find out before denying it.
it seems crazy to me that people still use brave–i’ve been reading nothing but terrible shit about them for years
Same, been there too. Still, it’s easy to miss articles on them, they only pop up once every so often. Same for Proton.
I might be a bit out of the loop, what about proton? I know they have their own AI chatbot, but did I miss anything else about them? AFAIK they are nowhere near Brave in terms of being utter garbage.
No, it’s nowhere near that, still the CEO came out in favor of Trump so I had to ditch them too.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
Thanks for the reply and source! I am not a fan of this, but not quite convinced to switch yet. May I ask what you switched to or what alternative email providers you could recommend? From my not very in-depth research, self-hosting an email server seems to be quite a nightmare.
I’ve been using Startmail recently. I really like that it lets you create multiple different permanent ‘aliases’ and can even create temporary aliases
I was weary of self-hosting email myself too, didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole. After some searching, I’ve landed on migadu.com. I just renewed the subscription after the first year, was 19$ a year for the micro plan, which is more than enough for my needs. Not sure why they use dollars though, as they are a Swiss company.
So far no problems, have ~10 of my domains hooked up for email.
The only downside I can spot is it’s bring-your-own-domain, so take that into account.
Appreciate the suggestion, I will look into it. I don’t have my own domain yet, but I guess it is about time…
Nice to find an up to date article, thanks
very helpful ty!