Brave appears to install VPN Services without user consent
3 years ago by argo_yamato to c/technology
If folk want to have a chromium-based browser made by a company, take a look at Vivaldi instead (which will keep the old plugin architecture, so adblockers work). It has a limited built-in blocker and extra features, but for now still runs uBlock.
Vivaldi is what I use, and it's absolutely the best Chromium browser I've ever tried.
That said, I'd switch to Firefox in a heartbeat if it could duplicate that sidebar. I use that thing all the time, and it's the only thing keeping me on Chromium.
Try it out. It's a sidebar that allows you to put all kinds of websites and tools in small pop-out windows.
A less visually appealing, but much more powerful version of the opera chat sidebar.
I've tried to get something similar in Firefox, but nothing comes even close.
Built-in functions >>> addons any day of the week.
(cfr mouse gestures)
It's a thin, persistent bar on the left side of the page with tools and shortcuts. By default, it's where you find bookmarks, history, downloads and things like that, but you can also add custom websites to it as well. They pop out either over or alongside the main window (depending on whether the pin button is pressed), and they display the mobile webpage when available, to be more usable in such a small window. It's how I use Discord and Mastodon.
Floorp is built on Firefox and was built in Japan and is a new browser with excellent privacy & flexibility.
There's something really funny about that sentence. I think it's because it reminds me of "remember Akira? That's from Japan."
I just switched to floorp from firefox, it's so nice to finally have another choice for a non-chromium browser with a reasonable number of plugins
it's also absolutely proprietary, so no, thanks.
As A Vivaldi user since day one, I gave it up once I couldn't take anymore of Googles/Chromium bull hockey. I'm just so done supporting a company like that. Firefox switch wasn't easy, but after the first week I got used to it and I'm never going back to Chromium browser. Anyone can switch if you actually care enough.
Thanks. I quickly tried it on YouTube and did get an ad. So I guess it doesn't work on those. Bummer.
Edit. Tried it some more and did not get any more ads. It takes a little to get the video playing but other that 10/10. No ad experience. Awesome.
it has an adblocker but it doesn't come even close to uBlock Origin. UBO is so many tiers above any other mobile browser built-in adblocker.
(which will keep the old plugin architecture, so adblockers work).
Will they? All I remember was them saying that their built-in adblock (which is very barebones) would still work after Manifest v3, nothing much else.
Seems you're right! I'll cross out that part. Sorry!
This is misleading. The BAT was a reasonable idea not really a scam.
It's not just BAT; Brave also supports NFTs, which are even more unambiguously a scam.
The company is in bed with the cryptocurrency "industry" which cannot exist without constant fraud, ransomware, and other crimes.
Just a reminder, one of the largest investors in Brave is a right-wing billionaire who runs a corporate espionage agency that contracts with the US Department of Defense to spy on people.
Well, it's about Peter Thiel, who also founded the Palantir surveillance technology company. As a source for his involvement with Brave, Wikipedia cites this TechCrunch article, which mentions funding from Thiel's "Founders Fund".
I'd rather criticize Brave for other reasons though, like being led by Brendan Eich or supporting crypto.
That's the best reason, but somebody already mentioned it and I didn't want to be redundant.
is it cool to hate crypto now? I thought the sort of people who use Lemmy would be all for the idea
Crypto is a scammers paradise.
I love it when I talked shit about this browser and get acused of wearing a tin foil hat.
Just a reminder, Brave was using people's likenesses to solicit donations without their consent, and without necessarily give those people the donations.
If you want to poke around, look up "Tom Scott and Brave".
What on earth is that? And in what sense is it better than Firefox?
Thank you. You had the opportunity to explain why you use it and why you recommended it, and yet you had me google it myself like I could have done from the start. Now I know it's a browser (like your comment implied) based on Firefox with additional privacy features. But I still don't know why you recommended it. Oh well.
Update: Brave plans to address the issue in a future release. The VPN service will only be installed after a user purchases the VPN.
"Oh gee whiz did we do that?! Woopsie doodle! We'll fix it someday!"
Furthermore, no data is sent to Brave from the VPN services. End
This might be true but the bigger problem is I have exactly zero reason to believe anything Brave says about the things they're installing on people's machines without consent. If you're still using Brave at this point you're a fool.
when did people start hating on Brave? last I heard it was the best browser for privacy.
They're Chromium based, which erodes any possible claim they could make to privacy.
Use Firefox instead. You can lock it down further than you can Brave and they don't rely on Google.
Doesn't Mozilla rely on Google for funding? Genuine question, as I though i read this else where on Lemmy
Stop using Brave, jfc. Please use Firefox, it's not the best, but it's better than this trash my goodness how many more scandals do people need to get rid of this crap?
Apple makes it quite difficult. Honestly, I don't think there's a good option. Maybe try DNS based adblocking, by either setting your DNS to one that blocks ads or by setting up a Pihole, which gives you more control.
Checkmate, Brave shills.
tbf the BAT thing is cool
I used to be a Brave user. I loved it. It worked well, it blocked ads without me asking, whatever. Then Google said they're gonna bake ad blocker blocking into the API and, knowing Brave was Chromium based, I went back to Mozilla after like 100 years.
Two observations:
I was kinda deluded
Mozilla got their shit together, Firefox is as awesome again, by comparison, as it was when they unseated Internet Explorer.
And mouse gestures! Configurable tab stacking! Workspaces! Notes and pinned tabs! Tab tiling! Web apps in the sidebar! I love Vivaldi.
Vivaldi is lead by an ex-Opera engineer.
Yeah, I followed their dev over when they left. Opera seems to be a mess these days. I used Opera for over a decade.
There's no built in crypto anything except for the odd ad on the homepage to buy crypto. Which, sure, is kinda lame, but they don't mine crypto in the background or anything like that.
it has a built in wallet. Nobody said it was mining anything.
It has an easy to find option to turn off everything related to Crypto
The only chrome variant that doesn’t seem sketchy to install is chromium. The built from open source chromium. And that’s just because some sites barely function unless you’re using chrome’s rendering.
For everything else, Firefox.
What about Thorium? Thoughts?
I don’t know that I’d call that a chromium browser but I’ve only looked at its docs for 10 minutes. Hard to say where chromium integration begins and ends there without digging into the code. Seems like, at most, it’s using the web rendering engine from the chromium project. But it also seems to suggest it has its own modules for executing/rendering js/css/html.
Probably not included in the “should be avoided” category.
Now I’m curious what it’s used for.
Not at all.
Safari is using WebKit, which they based on KDE's old KHTML engine, which is now discontinued.
Falkon uses qtwebengine which is Chromium's web engine + integration with QT user interface.
A Linux browser that uses WebKit (like Safari) is GNOME Web.
the brave experience was less than ideal for me, the brave search is unusable, i switched back to firefox, which i had moved to from chrome
also, related, but a side note, word to the wise, never ever ever use a free vpn ever, someones gotta foot the bill for the exit server bandwidth, and either they're keeping logs or they're not keeping logs, but you'll never know, and you won't know when they sell their settup to the next guy. always use a major vpn service who's audited and shown proof they're not keeping logs, they're in the business of secure and private vpn service. free vpns like what brave are offering are not in that business, and server, rack space, bandwidth costs actual money
If you need a Chromium browser use Ungoogled-Chromium, Windows version.
On android I prefer cromite. Dont know how it compares with ungoogled chromium on windows though. Firefox is the superior choice on desktop
The amount of people I see shilling for Brave like it’s God’s gift to privacy is frankly kind of disturbing given how many issues they’ve had with privacy
Software installs services to make its features operate, including optional default off ones. More news at 10.
Either it does it at install time, or when you try to turn on the VPN after subscribing to it, it pops an UAC prompt to finish installing optional components. That's standard practice, and it's good for security because it means they can flag the browser itself as not capable of elevating privileges. They're not going to put a gaping security hole in their software so that idiots don't write articles about "installing things without your concent". You already consented to installing Brave, you can't be surprised Brave is installed.
As long as it deletes them when you uninstall, this is a complete non-issue.
I guess it depends on how much you trust a company (both now and in the future) to do something they shouldn't with this kind of setup, whether on purpose or though incompetence.
Personally, I don't software silently installing unrelated services to my machine just in case the company decides they want to have it running on my machine in the future.
It is an advertised feature though. It can and will use those services if you enable them.
Should it also not come with the binaries for the VPN feature at all? That has downsides: maybe you're on a laptop trying to bypass a network block that also blocks the download of the VPN software but the VPN would work.
So if it's to come with the binaries, why can't it install the service too, that defaults to off and manual launch? On Linux that'd be a systemd unit, on Windows it's probably an API call of some sort but they basically contain the same information: some metadata, an executable and the privileges to launch it as.
I'd never seen a Linux user complain about <1kb systemd unit file being installed that's disabled by default and only started on demand when the feature is requested as part of a package they install. It just is and doesn't hurt anyone. Don't want it, don't use it.
When I download software, I expect all its built-in features to be installed and usable even if I don't use them, nor want them. It's part of the package.
It's kind of borderline because the VPN really could and should be a separate product entirely, I don't want to launch a browser just to then on a VPN. But they made it a built-in feature that's advertised as such, so it shouldn't surprise anyone.
Especially given its proprietary software. If you're that privacy and security conscious, why are you using proprietary software and not Firefox or Chromium or whatever the latest flavor of degoogled Chromium fork du jour is. The service is nothing compared to all the other crap they could be running in the browser completely hidden from you. That service is super transparent and upfront, if they wanted to hide it they could easily hide it. If you really don't want it to run, you can even set it to disabled entirely, and Brave won't even be able to start it.
If you're that paranoid, you really should be running Linux or at least avoid as much closed source software as possible.
Yeah I mean there’s a lot wrong with brave but this is like getting mad at software for installing an autoupdate service
The usual anti-Brave hate wagon, with FUD and pitchforks. They're already working on it:
VPN is a paid service, it doesn't connect to anywhere if one doesn't pay. This is just a service installed just in case. And complaining about this while using Windows , the OS with unavoidable telemetry, spyware and ads is just laughable.
Mozilla did far worse "mistakes" over the time (Pocket , Cliqz, Mr. Robot, deal with the worst privacy offenders on the Earth such as Google Facebook, Amazon, CEO pay rise while firing devs and losing market share, while begging for donations... and so on) but they somehow always get a free pass, with people swallowing Mozilla's corpo PR every single time.
Mozilla have some immunity because they do the hard work and actually develop a browser, while for Brave everything that matters is leeched from Google's Chromium.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !bravebrowser@lemmy.ml
Wow...a "FUD" user in the wild.
Only stupid people care about downvotes. And who are these "all"? A lot of people use Brave happily every day, while a lot of people deservedly leaves Firefox everyday because they realize the scam Mozilla is:
Please elaborate on why it's a scam
I think you meant Brave is a scam here.
I mean, it's not like Mozilla runs their own crypto wallet with the browsers keeping a mayor cut for themselves only because they are distributing the browser.
Mozilla does not run a crypto based ad network and inserts it into webpages.
Mozilla has never been caught inserting their own affiliated links into crypto related websites to receive a cut.
So you probably misplaced Mozilla with Brave there.
Sure, Mozilla is not perfect and they deserve criticism when they do things wrong (and they tend to). But Brave is just a chromium skin + a crypto based scam built-in.
What exactly do you think this link proves? Be specific.
Mozilla isn't some paragon of free open source non-profit charity like everyone is claiming, they need to make a profit just like everyone else to keep themselves up there as a competitor to Google. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
Currently use Firefox and Brave for different applications but I am considering switching to Vivaldi, I definitely want to do more research on all of them though.
I'm no fan of either Mozilla, Brave or Vivaldi.
Each of them is trying to make a cut with the browser.
I'd advise against Vivaldi because they have telemetry and it's proprietary.
What I suggest instead are free software, community managed projects that have no monetary interests in distributing the browsers: Librewolf and Ungoogled Chromium. Unlike Brave, Vivaldi or even Mozilla, these devs don't have incentives to put anti features into their browsers.
Currently migrating over to Librewolf, I really liked what it has to offer. Thank you for the suggestion!
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As a reminder, Brave was created by the guy who brought you JavaScript and was later fired from Mozilla for donating to hate groups. Brave also profits from multiple forms of fraud including NFTs and affiliate hijacking.
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