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

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.

What the hell. Guys read the fucking article. I mean both articles, there is another one linked into the main one. The inner article is bullshit, the author misunderstood a website. That makes the outer article bullshit too! How can people upvote such low quality posts???

An article by Alex Ivanovs of Stack Diary brought the allegations against Brave to light.

Then why the fuck are we reading this shit article and not reading the other one? I hate modern "journalism".

Also, from the original, non-ripped-off article (links retained):

And don't get me wrong, I love Brave, and I've given them credit where it's due; it's also my understanding that the Brave Search API feature is new as a whole (released in May 2023), so perhaps it wasn't or hasn't been thought through completely.

So, whatever fear-mongering this SEJ shit article was trying to cultivate is completely absent in the original article.

Intellectual property is intellectual theft.

This isn't a privacy issue it's a piracy issue. Which I have no problem with.

on one hand, whatever, today won't be the day i start giving a shit about intellectual property

on the other hand, if you wanted privacy, firefox has always been the right answer. i honestly don't know why you would want to use brave instead of it

Something always felt wrong with this browser. After using it for a few minutes I uninstalled it right away, it didn't feel right.

Oh look, bias confirmation but refused to read the article and just looked at the headline.

I read the article, it's still a crap browser. Even if the article is bullshit, a browser that advertises itself as good for privacy and then giving you "free money", it doesn't add up. You can say all you want, you can even be a crypto shill for all I care, if they give you anything for free, you are the product, nothing is free.

So which paid browser are you using?

w3m, qutebrowser, firefox built from source with telemetry and other stuff patched out . Firefox really when a site didn't work on w3m or qutebrowser.