From the first moment we connect to the Internet, maintaining privacy can be quite difficult. It is increasingly difficult to visit websites from a browser, such as Chrome or Edge, without our privacy being compromised and companies tracking us wherever we go. Therefore, sometimes projects appear that seek to change this, such as Brave, the private browser , which in a short time gained the trust of a significant number of users. However, success has gone to the head of this browser. So much so that it has broken even with its most elementary principles.
One of the characteristics of Brave was to offer browsing as pure as possible, blocking trackers and everything that could pose a danger to the privacy of users. The developers of Brave pretended to be different from those responsible for the other browsers, guaranteeing that the users were never going to be the product and they were not going to resort to practices to take advantage of them. However, in the end they have. And of course this has not been well received by users.
Hidden referrals when visiting certain websites
From one day to the next, and without prior notice, this web browser began to take advantage of users to generate their own income. Specifically, Brave began adding his own referral when users accessed the website of Binance, one of the most popular cryptocurrency traders, based in the United States.
The real problem has not been so much the fact of adding this referral, but how they have done it. The browser began to make this change in a hidden way and without prior notice , breaking with all the values that have marked the birth and growth of Brave, who today has about 5 million daily users around the world.
Obviously Brave, as a company, has to generate certain income. But there are other ways to do it. If this new measure had been notified, and even created an initial configuration wizard where users were asked to use these referrals, things would have been different. But they have preferred to go for the hidden, without warning, trying to sneak the referral to users. And breaking with the values that marked your birth and growth is wrong.
This feature will disappear, but can we still rely on Brave?
Brave CEO Brendan Eich himself admitted the mistake of adding this feature to the browser and has announced that they will remove it. However, trust is already broken. Who assures us that referral code is not being added in the background when visiting other websites, such as Amazon?
BrendanEich✔@BrendanEich
1/ We made a mistake, we’re correcting: Brave default autocompletes verbatim “http://binance.us ” in address bar to add an affiliate code. We are a Binance affiliate, we refer users via the opt-in trading widget on the new tab page, but autocomplete should not add any code.
Buy and Sell Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other Cryptocurrency | Binance US
Binance US
binance.us
Surely someone thinks that Chrome, Firefox, Edge and all other web browsers do it. And they are right. From the moment we installed a free browser on Windows, we gave up our privacy to become the product. And companies, to a greater or lesser extent, begin to take advantage of this. However, Google, Microsoft and other companies openly say so. What Brave has done has not been to hide referrals in his browser, but to deceive and betray the users who trusted him.
