Does Brave actually block ads now? Or does it still replace them with ads for scanmy cryptocurrency?
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Unlike other reply, I do not work at Brave, and I can also confirm that Brave never did that. They do have their own ads but those have always been opt in (you are not opted in by default), and they do pay some small amount of USD in their crypto token for opting in to those - it's pennies. People scoff at the pennies but guess who pays out nothing to show you ads against your will - literally everyone else.
What you may be thinking of was at one point, when you went to a URL (for some URLs), the browser would rewrite the URL to contain their affiliate link. There was blowback for doing that. They quickly removed that/haven't done it since as far as I know
Important part missing here, they didn't tell anyone about the affiliate URL rewriting and only removed it when caught.
> the browser would rewrite the URL to contain their affiliate link
In fairness, that is incredibly shady and they deserve this mistrust even years later because of it.
> Or does it still replace them with ads for scanmy cryptocurrency?
Brave never did that.
Brave blocks third-party ads & trackers by default.
(disclaimer: I lead privacy and adblocking at Brave)
lead what?
https://archive.is/W0k4j
(disclaimer: people remember how sketchy Brave is)
That was just a concept, it never made it to a live build AFAIK.
What they should have done instead is just take hundreds of millions of dollars from Google, like a non-sketchy browser.
Don't forget when they took donations on behalf of other websites and kept the money unless the operator went to the "escrow account" to collect it
The grants came from our token fund, not users' tokens (no way to buy BAT then).
The issue which I found out about late, and fixed right away, was infringing on right to publicity, nothing to do with donations from users' own tokens.
Jesus dont you see they are trying atleast an alternative to non consensual anal probes by other ad companies?
Already shared, but that (what you linked to) was a proposal and no deliverable was ever publicly released. A simple prototype was made and tested by a limited number of employees - instead of showing an ad, it would show a picture of a mustachioed man as a placeholder. That silly picture would be replaced with real code if the idea panned out. It didn't. The idea and the code was canned before I joined Brave and I've been here for almost 10 years (I joined August 2016).
Disclaimer in case it's not obvious: I am a Brave employee
I definitely tried out brave several years ago and legit got lots of crypto ads. I really don’t know how you are getting upvoted for lying about this.
It's incredible how people can hallucinate nonsense like this out of nothing, simply because their hatred for Brendan Eich drives them insane.
Maybe what GP remember is the VPN they secretly installed, the affiliate links they silently added, the donations they took for other companies and kept for themselves, or one of the other times Brave was caught. It is a wonder people think the code base is trustworthy when we know for a fact how they behave with stuff we can see. But sure, try to make it look like it has anything to do with a person hardly anyone have ever heard of.
With the number of times the above lie has been repeated and corrected, virtually every single Brave thread for several years straight now, I am inclined to think it's actually maliciousness which is motivating people to continue posting it.
This never happened.