> Brave have said from the beginning that this is how their business model works.
This sounded like a pretty surprising claim. I looked at the terms of use (https://brave.com/terms-of-use/) and the privacy policy for the browser (https://brave.com/privacy/) and I wasn't able to find any reference to the notion of automatically inserting affiliate or referral links. Do you have a more specific source on this? I'm really curious about when and how this has been communicated. I'm not trying to accuse you of anything, I just want to make sure I'm understanding the situation correctly.
The substance of their business model has always been "we fight advertisers because money should flow to websites through us". They changed actual terms a few times when called up on their tactics being shady, but that's always been the end goal. In that framework, hijacking referral links is par for the course.
I don't blame them - a man's gotta eat, and they're not doing anything illegal or dangerous - but I've always found very curious that some people actually believe using Brave might be an "ethical" choice. It just isn't, it's simply a better mousetrap.
Brave is really not solving any problem. People that truly want ads removed so they don’t get tracked or bothered, should simply install Firefox. It’s a brilliant browser regardless, and being developed and supported by a non for profit with a proven track record is what makes it trustworthy.
Brave can’t compete with that and Eich is not somebody anyone should rally behind in respect to ethical choices, or moral example. His personal choices to support legislation that will deny basic human rights from the LGBTQ community is a BIG clue.
Is it fair to call an action which materially supported oppression of people "personal"? The goal of that action was to deny people the right to marry.
I still fail to see how it's any different than any other moral disagreement. eg. If I were a evangelical christian, and he supported abortion rights for women, I can claim that he's literally trying to kill babies.
Right to happiness is not a moral question that needs to be debated every time someone on Fox News needs to generate mass hysteria for profit. I think the average person can differentiate between what’s moral and what’s immoral and where are the boundaries between the two. The USA is in a complete meltdown because some still insist on staying blind.
Even if it wasn't (the UDHR says it is, and the US Supreme Court has for quite some time held it to be a fundamental right), equal protection of the laws is also widely held to be.
The UDPR also says that it is your right to be arrested in order to be educated (oh hey, it is a human right for the detainees at the Xinjiang camps to be re-educated!). I can't consider this document as anything other than a joke.
> equal protection of the laws is also widely held to be
I am not against equal opportunity for both homosexual and heterosexual couples, rather, I am just anti-marriage. I think that it would be better to just remove any government support or acknowledgement of heterosexual marriage rather than make homosexual marriage official.
In addition it contains a lot of other crap that is not relevant to human rights such as "Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality ..." or "Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the ..."
That’s exactly how I feel about it. I’ve never doubted the legality, some pretty shocking things can be defended in TOS, but it just feels dishonest and scammy.
I would be surprised if inserting affiliate links in this manner wasn't against the TOS of the site. It's not adding value for the site if Brave is just front-running people who have already decided to go there.
Brave and Binance have a preexisting business relationship. Brave uses its own crypto funny-money and I think they even integrated a Binance-monitoring widget into the browser.
You can believe it, they are really good at advertising and marketing. They know the arena very well. Ad Ops is their biggest dept, if I had to guess. Everything they do is intentional with an end goal of getting a market share of the ad industry. It’s huge. They want a piece of it, and you’re right, who can blame them.
This sounded like a pretty surprising claim. I looked at the terms of use (https://brave.com/terms-of-use/) and the privacy policy for the browser (https://brave.com/privacy/) and I wasn't able to find any reference to the notion of automatically inserting affiliate or referral links. Do you have a more specific source on this? I'm really curious about when and how this has been communicated. I'm not trying to accuse you of anything, I just want to make sure I'm understanding the situation correctly.