I have seen many people in this community either talking about switching to Brave, or people who are actively using Brave. I would like to remind people that Brave browser (and by extension their search engine) is not privacy-centric whatsoever.
Brave was already ousted as spyware in the past and the company has made many decisions that are questionable at best. For example, Brave made a cryptocurrency which they then added to a rewards program that is built into the browser to encourage you to enable ads that are controlled by Brave.
Edit: Please be aware that the spyware article on Brave (and the rest of the browsers on the site) is outdated and may not reflect the browser as it is today.
After creating this cryptocurrency and rewards program, they started inserting affiliate codes into URL’s. Prior to this they had faked fundraising for popular social media creators.
Do these decisions seem like ones a company that cares about their users (and by extension their privacy) would make? I’d say the answer is a very clear no.
One last thing, Brave illegally promoted an eToro affiliate program making a fortune from its users who will likely lose their money.
Edit: To the people commenting saying how Brave has a good out-of-the-box experience compared to other browsers, yes, it does. However, this is not a warning for your average person, this is a warning for people who actively care about their privacy and don’t mind configuring their browser to maximize said privacy.
Why should I trust Mozilla over Brave? Just because Mozilla is a nonprofit subsidiary doesn’t mean that they don’t have an incentive to make money for their profit handling corporate division, the Mozilla Corporation. I tried playing around with Firefox and not having the option to directly add a less-used search engine than the ones given without extensions was pretty sketchy to me. All of the complaints people have about Brave like ads and the weird crypto thing are very configurable in the settings, and I have a lot less compatibility issues compared to Firefox. Also, the source linked claiming all of this is a sketchy Neocities site that anyone could have made that doesn’t even prove why Brave isn’t private. I get that people are loyal to their favorite browsers but this is silly. If you really want to be private, use the Tor network, but all browsers and extensions need to track you in some degree to function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation
Firefox has plenty of forks. You either trust Brave (and by extension Google) or you trust the people forking Firefox and Mozilla.
Tor isn’t designed for daily driving.