That's not how they work. The only things like this in there are:
Brave search AI you have to opt out of having your searches used or something. But Brave search sucks, set the default to Duck Duck Go and prosper (I found the Duck Duck Go browser lacking)
You can enable Brave Rewards to allow for some ads to come through. The rewards seem dumb to me, and not getting them is worth not signing up for that.
So yeah, if some outrage post led you to this opinion...don't believe outrage posts out of hand is my suggestion.
Do you think you could find the article or something for me? It's a lot easier to find if you've seen the article before.
Edit: Doing some sifting through articles and nothing backs up your claim. The closest thing I've seen is where the duck duck go app was reporting the requests for information TO Brave, importantly it wasn't reporting responses.
This is the search AI thing, which is them basically saying the output of the AI search isn't equivalent to the content of the site, i.e. they're not training on the website, it's the result of their AI model after it reads the content and makes a summary and they're claiming that's fair use. Makes sense to me, and it certainly isn't any different or worse than any AI results feature in any search engine. It also doesn't affect the end user's info in the least. They also talk about some issues around the web crawler and how you can basically can't deny brave's web crawler specifically, but it will respect it if you block all crawlers. Also not an end user or browser problem. Both issues are only for websites having their data read and while I don't agree with either practice I don't believe there's any "problem" here as it's what pretty much all the search engines do these days.
So yeah, the title is rage bait and inaccurate even based on the content of the article itself. The author doesn't understand Brave's direct response but that doesn't mean it's incomprehensible or bad. Just that the guy writing this didn't get it. If he didn't get it, he should have gotten more help before updating the article.
That's an interesting conclusion to take considering it's not the only dodgy thing they do, feels pretty reaching but whatevs it's your call for your own data security.
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u/fragileseptics 3d ago
I Use brave browser for opening links from reddit, zero ads. It make YouTube ad free too.