Though we have been a fan of Brave, and we feel it is still one of the best privacy focussed browsers right now, we have noticed some claims by users that Brave is profiting by "forcefully" pushing referral links. Lets dive in to see whats really happening!
We noticed one tweet recently, and tried to dig in a little bit into whats happening.
The crypto-friendly, privacy focussed browser has been earning affiliate commissions by redirecting certain search queries to some exchanges (we have noticed its Binance only) via affiliate links.
Unlike the “opt-in” principle by which the company abides—advertisements are optional on the browser and pay out cryptocurrency(BAT) to anyone who views them,
Brave never asked its 15 million monthly users about these redirects.
Full thread:
So this claim is pretty much valid, we tried entering binance.com on brave browser, and it "redirects" though I noticed its not a redirect, its just an autofill (which means they havent yet "breached" the trust).
But our concern is, Brave never explicitly mentioned that they will be generating some reveue through the use of affiliate links by autofilling on cryptocurrency exchanges.
So we just created a new user profile on Brave browser to see whats really happening.
After pressing enter, we can see that it autofills the referral code as below:
They appear to be autofilling those referral links.
On further checking, we can see that they are also working in incognito mode and even the Browse privately with TOR mode.
On a recent tweet reply by Brave CEO (and Javascript founder) Brendan Eich,
He mentioned that the Brave browser is indeed using them as they have "partnered" with Binance.
We have also noticed one more thing:
If you directly click on someone else's referral link, it will not replace that referral link with the Brave referral link (at least some relief though)
--
On checking with the Mobile browser, we didnt notice this yet. Binance.com and binance.us is not autofilling the referral code.
Another twitter user tweeted the below claim:
A Brave browser developer recently tweeted as well on this:
Have a look at the most recent tweet by Brave CEO:
If you notice the Source code on Github, you can see that they fill their referrals for Coinbase and Trezor as well.
So another popular CT influencer by the name Whalepanda recently tweeted thi:
And Brave developer, by the name Sampson apologised that they should have given more notice.
Here's the full link.
Our take: We are overall neutral on this, though we feel Brave is trying to generate "clean" revenue through advertisement and referral links, which may not be wrong as such, but we personally feel they should have publicly issued a notice, to have users' voices heard before they implemented a feature like this. Without issuing public notices and doing things like these attracts unwanted criticism and negativity about the company.
We do appreciate the apologies, but a big company like this should be a bit more careful, and do things in a more calculated way.
Perhaps, if, they actually pushed advertisement like they usually push through notifications:
like: "We have partnered with Binance, please use our referral code if you want a new acount to support us in developing Brave"; that would have actually helped more instead. as it would have involved voluntary support by users
Let us know in the comments below about what you think!
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