2y ago

The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

stackdiary.com The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training

I'm fairly certain that I was not the only person in the world who thought to himself, "Did they just yoink the entire Internet and bundle it together

From the article:

"I know for a fact that Wikipedia operates under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license, which explicitly states that if you're going to use the data, you must give attribution. As far as search engines go, they can get away with it because linking back to a Wikipedia article on the same page as the search results is considered attribution.

But in the case of Brave, not only are they disregarding the license - they're also charging money for the data and then giving third parties "rights" to that data."

112 comments

TIL; stay away from Brave.
Not only because of this article, but merely an hour ago I have read also this post (numerous links provided in the post) about the dubious Brendan Eich.
- i don't get why people choose to use brave, firefox is great and if you really need that chromium base ungoogled chromium exists
  
  Firefox has always been my go-to. In my opinion more people should use it.
  
  I think Brave did some aggressive marketing, including social media posts and comments. I did buy their narrative at first too - a browser that already tuned to block ads and trackers. But later I've noticed that it constantly connects back to brave server and it looked suspicious. Firefox is the best.
  
  Brave is great for less techy people because it's defaults are good enough. It's not necessary to tweak settings and install add-ons to get basic privacy. I definitely prefer Firefox, but it takes some knowledge to get it to surpass Brave's defaults.
  
  For me, Firefox is an inferior product in terms of security feature implementation
  https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html
  
  Stock Firefox has very limited privacy protections.
  
  ungoogled chromium exists
  The reason is they have proper build infrastructure managed by the Brave. With Ungoogled Chromium the binaries are produced by third parties, vary in version etc. People claim they would only use "open source software" but they do download binary versions nevertheless and don't compile that code themselves. This increases the risk of a supply chain attack, where a malicious binary is submitted and nobody has really knows until it is too late. The other issue is they disable CRLSets because of "google hate" which we think actually increases the likelihood of a MiTM attack occurring because rogue certificates are not detected and invalidated as quickly as they could have been.
  This article describes a few other things https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/
- Everything is a process and personally thats no excuse to not criticize the bad actions of a project like brave, but in the topic of personal opinions like those from Brandon Eich’s, i think is completely emotional the reactions of the brave users, he has awful opinions with the same sex mariage thing and covid but that does not mean the damn product/service he's part of is bad or have censorship. He better shut up and dont ruin a good project because he wants to "speak up" about his stupid rant about insane opinions that makes bad PR.
- Well fuck. Thank you. Guess i need to change browsers. Any recs or is firefox best?
  
  Ungoogled Chromium is my current favourite
  Previously was using Firefox Developer’s edition which is also decent. But I like a minimalist browser that acts more like a framework to which I can just add what I want, and doesn’t come with a lot of bullshit I don’t need.
  
  You can try Librewolf. It is a firefox fork with focus on privacy. You do not need to go through many settings when setting it up, as you need to do with firefox standalone.

I liked Brave for a while. But slowly things just started to feel sketchy to me. Their weird insistence on putting their crypto bullshit and wallet services in your face. I just felt like, "I want a browser. Can't you just be a fucking browser?" At a certain point adding all these other 'services' they just end up just a weird-ass money making scheme, like they're two steps away from using my computer for crypto mining.

tsk tsk tsk. When will people learn to just use Firefox or Librewolf? Do you want a web browser, or an AI training crypto wallet?
- I read ya.
  I was always skeptical about Brave with their side projects of crypto etc. Its funny because privacytools.io recommends them till this day.
  I have been using Librewolf for some time now and I am happy with it.
  
  privacytools.io is no longer the recommended one since the mod/domain owner split a long while ago, it now heavily endorses ads (such as nordvpn) you instead should use
  https://www.privacyguides.org/en/tools/
  Brave still is a great browser just disable a few settings as recommended in the guide
  
  Privacy Guides recommends them also.

This not exclusive to brave, AI copyright is still not clear. Bing and others like Bard are doing the same.
- Yeah and I expect it from those companies. I guess I was naive enough to think Brave would be better than this.
  But then I didn't know about Eich's homophobia, antivaxx beliefs and basic awfulness either (as mentioned in the link u/Xaeris mentions.)
  
  Honestly I don't care about his political beliefs, and Brave search is the only competitve independent search engine out there, it's genuinely a joy to use. Until AI crawling gets banned they aren't doing anything wrong.
  Brave continues to be the best mainstream private browser, backed by actions instead of empty words like Firefox.
  
  I guess the crypto stuff along with the ads just made me not at all shocked by this. Not that I think it's a bad browser, since I've had people I tried to explain addons too who found it too confusing so needed an out the box built in solution. But, Firefox continues to be my go to for years and years.
  
  You linked to the Alexandrite app, not lemmy itself.

the shady world of brave

Whelp that’s it I’m going to Firefox. That’s all I needed to see
Edit: annnd uninstalled. That’s all she wrote

Lol isn't that what all these ai chatbots are doing?

Well fuck, what am I supposed to use? I use bitwarden for passwords, so that shit works everywhere, but I want a mobile browser and a desktop browser that share history. Being able to share tabs between devices is a nice bonus.
Firefox on mobile is hot garbage with infuriating UI bugs. I keep trying to switch to it, and keep switching away after a few days.
I'm sure as shit not going to Chrome.
- What issues are you encountering on android Firefox? I've used Firefox + ublock for years and I don't think I have ever encountered an issue that was fixed by using chrome instead.
  
  I've never had any big problems with Firefox Android either. I do prefer the Fennec branch though, since it's on F-Droid and has about:config
- I use Firefox on iOS and grapheneOS and it works fine. UI is not as nice as others but it works. Never seen bugs personally ¯(ツ)_/¯
  
  Isn't Firefox on iOS essentially a skinned Safari? Unless Apple has changed their stance, I thought all browsers had to use webkit?
  
  Maybe I'm just cursed then. When full screening a video in landscape there's a 30% chance the tab will freak out and close. When I scroll sometimes the content doesn't move, but the menu bars show up as if I was scrolling. Trying to swipe through google images takes several tries before it will stick. These are just a few problems, I'm sure I've seen more.
- Librewolf
- May not be as ideal as it requires manual selection but Chromium has a visible share button for QR on the address bar. Or you can use Pushbullet/Join/KDE Connect to share links with your phone.

I'd like to shout out Mull (Firefox based) and Mulch (Chrome based) web browsers. They are basically more secure and private versions of those app and they maintained by the devs of DivestOS which is the privacy Android OS that is recommended for devices that aren't Pixels.
- Yep, I use Mull on my mobile. Supports various privacy related add-ons too.

Is this only referring to the Brave search engine?
- But it is designed by their company. Their products represent their leadership.
  Firefox and DDG for me.
  
  I honestly just started cracking up after seeing DDG mentioned after those initial 2 sentences.
  DuckDuckGo does not care about your privacy. Switch to SearX, StartPage, or Kagi.
- It's their Search API.
- Looks like yes

Does anyone have another Chromium browser recommendation for Android?
- Idk why you want to go with chromium based, firefox got mobile extensions!
  Ublock origin on the go
  
  On Android, Firefox lacks per-site process isolation, which makes it less secure than Chromium browsers (not insecure, just less secure.)
  With privacy.resistFingerprinting on, Firefox on Android is stuck at 60hz, which I don't like.
  There is a noticeable difference in performance between Firefox and Chromium. Firefox is consistently slower when loading webpages, which you notice after using Chromium.
  Don't get me wrong, I like Firefox. I use LibreWolf on desktop. I just can't justify using it on Android, at least not yet. Guess I'll go back to using Vanadium.
  
  It even has desktop extensions if you use nightly mobile.
- Mulch
- Kiwi has extensions. I like kiwi.

Is that shady? Arent all other AI companies + many other data gather services doing exactly the same thing. We need to wait for the court cases to conclude if AI datasets can use publicly available information for training.
- Just because multiple companies are doing it doesn't make it less shady. They're literally selling you 'rights' to content that isn't theirs to sell.

I've been telling people for over a year to not use brave after they did that crypto referral injection thing lol

Yet another reason to not use Brave

Any particular add-ons for Firefox other than uBlock Origin? I have Tampermonkey and Stylish, but anything else you all recommend?
I've seen Librewolf being recommended as well.
- https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions
  
  Thank you. I've always used Firefox and when Brave came out I thought I'd give it a go, been using it about 50/50 with Firefox. After reading this I'll be getting rid of Brave!
  It's a shame. I like what Brave was at the beginning.
- Decentraleyes
  
  Redundant. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-dont-bother

I used Brave for quite a while after having some kind of problem with mobile firefox. It got worse and worse the whole time, it defaults to a home screen with ads on it now. I assumed they got bought out or something a while ago. Sad to say but not really shocked that they're doing some kind of aggressive data collection.

112 comments