Brave as a company being shady isn’t anything new though. Purely from a privacy standpoint, however, there has never been an indication they have violated users’ trust in that regard. The latest furore you linked is questionable, but nothing to do with privacy.
Still, I personally have very limited trust in the company which is why I don’t use their browser and only rarely use their search.
Their Privacy Policy page seems fairly straightforward to me:
Brave Search is designed to be private by default. We don’t collect personal information about you, your device or your searches. We also don’t transmit information to the web that could be used to profile you or track you or learn anything about you. Your searches are private to YOU.
We temporarily process IP addresses to detect and prevent bots in order to ensure the integrity and availability of the service for all users. IP addresses are not retained but are deleted within seconds.
To me these are clear claims they do not store search terms or IP addresses. Period.
Of course this is what they say. As with any third party search you have to trust they’re doing what they say.
I mean, the article you linked is literally complaining that bullshit sites peddling conspiracies about the moon landing being faked or school shootings being faked are being downranked.
Misinformation being downranked seems to be a major plus to me. 🤷♀️
As with any search engine hosted by someone other than yourself, you essentially have to trust their privacy policy.
DDG’s privacy policy is actually fairly simple:
We don’t save your IP address or any unique identifiers alongside your searches or visits to our websites. We also never log IP addresses or any unique identifiers to disk. This means that when you use our services, we have no way to create a history of your search queries or the sites you browse.
Assuming they’re doing what they say they’re doing, DDG is excellent for privacy.
I personally use DDG, although echo some others that you may have to be a little more specific when searching for some things to get good results. If results aren’t to my liking, I’ll use some other privacy-respecting search engines such as Brave Search and Startpage.
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It once again pains me slightly to be defending this company, as I really do not want people to ignore their questionable business practices when evaluating their trust in them. With that said though, it is important to present correct facts:
Using the EDDM service provided by the USPS that allows blanket mailing of every house within an entire ZIP code does not constitute a “customer list leak.” This is just targeted spam mailing to a ZIP location; Brave don’t even know who they’re sending the mail to. Most likely aren’t Brave users and probably don’t even know about the company, which is the entire point of sending them spam mail I guess.
Your message makes it sound like Brave acquired and printed the names and addresses of Brave customers to send them mail, constituting a leak of their customer list. They didn’t.