Brave browser allegedly sell copyrighted data

DeriHunter@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 167 points –
Brave Browser Under Fire For Alleged Sale Of Copyrighted Data
searchenginejournal.com
33

You are viewing a single comment

Im shocked. The browser that’s always been a bit sketchy is caught being sketchy?

This is about the search engine, not the browser. Although I realize that’s a distinction without a difference.

I’m not sure what to think of this article. I had to read for several paragraphs to get to know, that the problem is neither selling any user data collected by the browser (e.g. text inputs), nor is it the fact that they’re a search engine. It just that they offer an API for search which not only lists the same data as on the website, but offers a longer excerpt/text snippet for each result as it is seen on other search engines for some featured results. Depending on which UI you might want to develop for the results, that’s basically a nice feature as your app can decide which snippets get shown.

And now the problem seems to be that they offer a paid API and these results are a part of it? From data that was crawled by them by (as they’re saying) respecting robots.txt and - in most cases - was public anyways?

You are right. This article is complete BS. The author got it all wrong. I'm ashamed to see this gets upvoted on Lemmy

There was a better article somewhere that detailed what they thought was the dishonesty around Brave's claim that they respect robots.txt. Even so, this isn't to do with the browser. There are interesting copyright questions here, but it doesn't have anything to do with privacy per se.