I can’t believe I only just found out about this. Were y’all aware? Is this a concern for Brave?
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I generally tend to focus on the product and the value it brings. If it gets beyond the threshold for what I consider enshittification, I move to an alternative.
But for now and especially with Brave Origin, not concerned.
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Be aware, all clickbaity topics must include at least one citation
Jokes aside, I’m pretty sure every company with a sufficient net worth exchanges cash in some smoke filled back room. They can all get bent for all I care. Ultimately, Brave Browser is a fine privacy tool regardless
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VC funding and its significance in evaluating a product or service is a topic of some discussion here. Searching the forums should give you some examples - namely in relation to Skiff’s fallout, with arguments made that VC-funding should be a disqualifier for recommendations on PG. One reply highlights Brave specifically.
For Peter Thiel specifically, some have previously called for Brave’s removal based on this alone, though other considers his actual involvement and its implication minimal (as you’ll see in the replies).
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Kinda makes sense given the Brave CEO notoriously has some reactionary views. However so long as Brave is open source and auditable I don’t think it’s an immediate concern from a privacy stand point (however from an ethics stand point that’s up to you).
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I want to be very careful about using services and software backed by venture capital, especially Thiel’s Founders Fund. For me, VC-backed companies almost always tend to lean toward enshittification for the goal of bigger ROI (return on investment).
Brave is something I have fights with myself over - the browser itself is really good, their integrated content blocker is comparable with uBlock Origin, and their account-less sync feature is amazing, too. But the VC aspect, the side business with Web3 and cryptocurrency, and the history of their CEO always leave a sour taste in my mouth when I do use it. But also the work on their rust-adblock project and their interest in seeing Linux move forward (from what I’ve understood when Brave Origin, the paid debloated version of Brave, began circulating) make me believe that there are good people working to makectually good software and trying to steer Brave in a good direction. I guess only time will tell.
But I think the pain of migrating away wouldn’t be too big if it ever becomes necessary. There are a lot of promising Chromium forks, the most interesting one being the Helium browser, that are worth watching.
This isn’t a situation where some sinister plot is happening behind the scenes. We know better, since Brave is probably one of the most heavily scrutinized and open source monitored browsers available.
This is more of a “the enemy of my enemy is my frienemy” dynamic. That’s why a group would fund something that completely opposes its own mission statement.
That specific investor has always been super critical of Google’s business model, and that VC firm saw Brave as a way to pull the attention economy out from under them and other tech giants. Financing any threat to Google, no matter how minor or where it comes from, is a massive potential upside.
I know there’s also a part of this where he was interested in the crypto stuff, but I never really explored that. I just don’t care about the crypto stuff, so I’m not really equipped to talk about that. I don’t know if he was collecting monkey NFT’s or NFT’s of his wifus or what his interest in that portion was.
It is an ideological mismatch when it comes to data privacy, but venture capital is all about being pragmatic above everything else. They didn’t invest their money because they decided they care about blocking your cookies or saving you from fingerprinting. They found someone creating a new way to attack Google and they wanted in.
This hasn’t changed Brave’s mission statement at all, and it’s pretty clear it hasn’t had any real world impact on the browser itself. If anyone actually has a compelling argument showing that accepting money from a data surveillance firm has compromised Brave’s privacy first approach, I’ll be the first to peace out. But, I just haven’t seen anything like that when it comes to Brave.
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Brave has a storied history of showing exactly who they are, whether one cares or not is dependent on their personal values
The old adage never, ever fails — when people (or company leaders/owners) show you who they are, believe them
I believe them, and always have
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Did my own research off the post made by the good folks at r/deGoogle.
The one event that is verifiably known to be true that there was a seed funding round in 2016. Peter Thiel is confirmed to be a partner and a co-founder of Founders Fund and never mentioned to verifiably be directly involved in this case.
There was at least five major investors present according to the press release: Founders Fund’s FF Angel, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and Digital Currency Group.
Brave managed to raise 4.5 million $. Amounts invested for each investor seem not to be public knowledge.
As of today (8th of May), no other verified links have been brought up (to my knowledge) between Brave and Thiel other than Founders Fund (and others) having been a part of this one funding round.
Sources:
links to the r/deGoogle post “Info re. Brave: We do not appreciate misinformation about the ownership structure of companies.” regular Reddit link, Reddit frontend link
I use Brave very begrudgingly. They have been heavily sketchy pretty much since the beginning but there is nothing to migrate to that is chromium based for the time being. I am actively looking at the Hardening Chromium Project to have MacOS support but for the time being I am stuck using Brave with policies.
Brave had a referral program that seemed to have the intention of getting people on Brave to raise the value of their shitcoin and has always made me skeptical of them.
We all should’ve stopped trusting them the moment when they got caught adding affiliate links to crypto urls and pocketing the BAT of creators who had no idea they were getting contributions which is very much giving the same vibes as the Honey extension to be honest.
I view Brave the same way I view Apple when it comes to privacy. They only care about protecting it so their market share is more valuable in the future. Some may disagree here but I personally believe any form of advertising outside of word mouth and promotion is coercion. People argue all the time about it being open source but in practice that really does nothing if the rest of the company is pretty opaque.
With that being said it may be difficult to migrate away from Brave for various reasons
On iOS it can be used a solid YouTube Client since nothing like NewPipe exists and when they do pop up it never lasts long term. On Stock Android it’s the only decent alternative to Chrome that can keep up with security updates. On desktop there is Helium but the inclusion and integration of the unmaintained uBlock Origin MV2 is a major security concern for me that I cannot overlook. Trivalent is awesome if you have Fedora and Vanadium if you use GrapheneOS and looks like the best implementation of web browsers I’ve seen so far. Issue is they are restricted to one OS
Ublock Origin (MV2) isn’t unmaintained but rather it is simple incompatible with most current chromium based web browsers.
For more details see: Github: Ublock Origin - Will development of uBO continue?
Will development of uBO continue?
Yes, there are other browsers which are not deprecating Manifest v2, e.g. Firefox.
Whether or not Helium (or other chromium based browsers) should continue to support Ma ifest V2 is a separate, equally valid discussion.
+1 for Trivalent and Vanadium
VCs demonstrate herd behaviour (FOMO, if you will) repeatedly, as the returns are utterly dictated by power law (a very small percentage of businesses dominate their total returns). Their plays don’t strike me as pragmatic but escalating bets in a game of high risks (prospect theory be damned). It is another thing they want to appear pragmatic and ambitious and world-changing etc. Though, their shtick does get found out from time to time.
It isn’t that. It is usually the marketing copy from these companies that irks whoever is paying attention. From “What is Brave?” (archive), Big tech makes huge profits off our data, and tells us what’s true and what's not. Brave is fighting back. Hm… nice ideal, except some also lump in (for their own mileage) beneficiaries of that big-tech-money with big tech, itself. Now, this isn’t you, but you also aren’t others. As in, in your view, the agent (Brave’s products, in this case) is aligned with the principal’s (customer) own interests, which is totally subjective (see).
Also, according to CrunchBase, their CEO is an advisor at Peter Thiel’s Palantir.
https://www.crunchbase.com/person/brendan-eich
There’s a big article about him here.
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