https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/06/06/the-brave-web-browser-is-hij... The Brave web browser sells itself on privacy, security and ad-blocking. It also has its own cryptocurrency, the Basic Attention Token. As such, it’s a favourite with crypto people — or ones who don’t know how to install uBlock Origin, anyway. # What Brave’s done this time Brave is very into affiliate marketing. Just in March this year, Brave was caught running eToro affiliate marketing without the legally-required disclaimers — and Brave staff were caught deleting all mention of this from the /r/brave_browser subforum on Reddit. [Github, archive] If you’re using Brave and try to go to the Binance crypto exchange, Brave hijacks the Binance link you typed in, and autofills with its own affiliate code. This was spotted by @cryptonator1337 on Twitter earlier today. [...] This ignores the legally required disclosures for affiliate links — the disclosures that Brave also ignored for the eToro links in March. In the US, the FTC has required full disclosure of affiliate marketing since 2009 — you have to put it right there on the page. Similar rules apply in the UK and the EU. (See my Amazon disclosure at the bottom-right of this post, for example.) However, Eich is very sorry that Brave got caught — again — and something will be changed in some manner to stop this behaviour, or at least obscure it. (Eich doesn’t say precisely what the totally fine thing Brave thought it was doing was, or what’s going to change here.) [...] # What should Brave do? I’d like to assume Eich is acting in good faith here — but this sort of nonsense keeps happening. When you see you’ve done something wrong, you should fix it — then explain what you got wrong, that you understand why your users are upset, and precisely how this happened, step by step. Then you don’t do it again. And you put systems into place so that you don’t do it again. What you don’t do is to rack up a chain of other unmarked affiliate advertising, or pull what looks remarkably like donation fraud. Then apologise each time, say you’ve fixed it … and then do it again. This is precisely what scammers do — they apologise, they swear they’ll fix it, and then they do it again. # What should I do, as a Brave user? There is no good reason to use Brave. Use Chromium — the open-source core of Chrome — with the uBlock Origin ad blocker. Or use Firefox with uBlock Origin — ‘cos it blocks more ads than the Chromium framework will let anything block Or [...] _________ Non condivido appieno le alternative suggerite. Anzitutto perché preferisco suggerire uMatrix ad uBlock Origin (anche se mi rendo conto che richiede un minimo di formazione per essere usato correttamente). E poi perché sia Chromium che Mozilla bilanciano la sicurezza degli utenti con gli interessi economici dei propri finanziatori. Giacomo