Several days ago, news broke that sparked a total scandal against the Brave web browser , which in "theory" positions itself as a different browser from the others, since it claims to "protect the privacy of its users".
Quotation marks are used at this point because this part is unclear. It's important to remember that Brave is being developed under the leadership of Brendan Eich, the creator of the JavaScript language and former head of Mozilla.
The browser is based on the Chromium engine, focuses on protecting user privacy, includes an integrated ad-cutting engine, can work through Tor, provides built-in support for HTTPS Everywhere, IPFS and WebTorrent, and offers an alternative subscription-based funding mechanism for banners.
The latter is positioned as a new ecosystem of rewards based on attention and uses a basic attention token (BAT), a new way to value attention, connecting users, content creators and advertisers.
Once a month, Brave Rewards will send the corresponding amount of BAT, divided according to your attention, from the local wallet based on the browser to the sites that have been visited, this being a form of financial support for all those web masters.
So far everything sounds good and is positioned as an excellent idea that no other browser offers and it seems that they have no interest in doing so.
But things changed and go against what the browser claims to do , as it was revealed that the web browser performs the substitution of “referral links” when trying to open some sites through a set of their domains in the address bar (the links on the opened pages do not change).
For example, when you enter "binance.com" in the address bar, the autocomplete system automatically adds the referral link "binance.com/en?ref = ???" to the domain.
In addition, it performs a similar behavior for the domains coinbase.com, binance.us, ledger.com and trezor.io. Such actions were perceived by many as improper manipulation that undermines the trust of users.
By doing this, it no longer fulfills the requirement of "maintaining user privacy," since by having control of the URLs and replacing referral links, it is clear that the emails of many users are displayed in various referral systems.
Apart from the fact that many users called it a very disgraced way to generate income.
Faced with this problem, the project manager explained that the appearance of this functionality in the input completion mechanism was caused by an error.
The problem is caused by a flaw in the code to transmit the partner's identifier during translation from the address bar of requests to search engines.
By entering keywords in the address bar, a request is sent to the search engine with an identifier - all browsers participating in paid search engine programs send similar identifiers.
Due to a bug, direct entry of the recommended partner service domain also led to the partner ID being connected to the domain itself.
However, this did not convince Brave users at all, as information was revealed that Brave is actually associated with an affiliate program with Binance and some other crypto exchanges, but the referral code is used in the widget that is displayed in the disconnected ad block in the new tab.
Finally, the people at Brave said the fix came down to disabling the default setting that controls the replacement of Brave's recommendations for auto-completion in the address bar (previously, the setting was enabled by default).
The list of substitutions in which the reference links are indicated is left the same.