If the allegations are true, Brave has found a remarkably efficient business model: block the publisher’s ads, bypass its paywall, scrape its articles, then sell the results to AI companies. All while marketing itself as the browser that protects people from shady internet practices.
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2026
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Brave’s always been shady.
I don't get why it is listed in the Arch Linux wiki.
I would guess BAT investors
Sounds about right, given that its previous business model was MITMing ads in order to extort website owners to buy its crypto.
They also own their own ad company.
Fuck you, Brendan Eich
And people over in Reddit and tech-illiterate people recommend this garbage?
Always have. Did you know blatantly lying to idiots will get those idiots to repeat those lies? It's true!
People in this thread are recommending brave lol
Sure. Let media outlets owned by the rich fight tech companies owned by other rich people. Doubt it changes anything though.
damn i hope both of them lose somehow
Glad I decided to drop them and go with Duck Duck Go instead six months or so ago. Heard some shitty things about the owners of Brave...
What browser do y'all (who hopefully are more informed than me) recommend? I've switched from Chrome to Firefox and now to Brave...
Librewolf on desktop, Ironfox on mobile
Iron Fox isn’t on iOS.
DuckDuckGo browser. Also, all browsers on iOS are just reskinned Safari (aka they all use the WebKit engine). IIRC DuckDuckGo browser has decent adblocking? Or just use Safari with uBlock Origin Lite which is probably safer and better.
Firefox is still perfectly fine.
Waterfox
I use Librewolf for corporate attention-economy sites. It strips the bloat, and of course, has the venerable ublock. Vimium-c is my other must-have extension to make FF-based browsers more usable.
My all-time favorite and primary is vimb. Since migrating to webkitgtk-6.0, it works quite well. Every instance is bubblewrapped, but if anonymity is your goal, you'd want to make sure it's carefully configured. You are probably aware, but browserleaks.com is a nice site for privacy testing.
Why the fuck would you choose Brave? What was appealing about that mess when you had Firefox which works absolutely fine to begin with? Anything built on Chromium is not in your best interest.
Go back to Firefox or any of the various derivatives.
If you must have a back up chromium browser at least choose something like Vivaldi.
LIbrewolf is my personal choice along with mulvad browser but I don’t use chromium browsers
The article lack details on how that scraping is done, and I think those details are crucial to evaluate how serious are the allegations.
afaik brave has a feature that lets users upload their browsing data to brave for it to "improve its search engine", maybe it's that. in that case brave browser users are distributed scrapers.
I don’t love brave… it’s kinda wierd…
How do Brave Bypasses NYT's paywall? In the past I've managed that with an extension, not anymore .
you can use archivetoday and it will archive it and load it without the paywall iirc. though I haven't been able to do that in a while since they have the Google QR captcha now.
I wonder how the Washington Post feels about it?