Brave is in trouble for modifying URLs and placing referral links

Few days ago news was released that unleashed a total scandal against web browser Brave which in "theory" is positioned as a browser different from the others, because it says "protect the privacy of its users."

Up to this point quotation marks are used at these points because it leaves in doubt this part. Remember Brave is being developed under the leadership of Brendan Eich, the creator of the JavaScript language and the former head of Mozilla.

The browser is based on the Chromium engine, focuses on protecting the privacy of users, includes a built-in ad slicing engine, can run 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.

However things changed and go against what the browser says to do, Ya que 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 open 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.

For By doing this, you no longer comply with the part of "maintaining user privacy", Well, by having control of the url substituting referral links, it is clear that the emails of many users are shown 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 such functionality in the check-in completion mechanism it 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.

But this did not convince Brave users of anything, as information was released 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 displayed in the offline ad unit in the new tab .

Finally, Brave folks said the fix came down to disabling settings Controlling override of Brave recommendations for automatic completion in the address bar (previously, the setting was on by default).

The list of substitutions in which the reference links are indicated is left the same.