It seems possible that Brave are building Brave Pro, which looks like its a subscription based service of some kind. A note on the Android implementation of the project reads (GitHub link):

"Implement the required runtime changes (profile settings, chrome flags, group policies, etc.) with the appropriate values that enable the Brave Pro experience. Using Brave in this mode with its default settings and making changes to the Brave Pro defaults require an active paid subscription.

When the browser has no active credentials for Brave Pro, the panel UI will promote the service and include the initial payment CTA. When credentials are present the panel UI will include the appropriate toggles for making changes to the default settings."

It also links to a private Google Doc.

  • Melody Fwygon@lemmy.oneEnglish
    143·
    7 months ago

    Unsurprisingly, Brave will try to profit from privacy seeking users…I hope their company dies a horrible financial death.

    I’ve always disliked Brave for their carelessness in pursuing their business needs, adding stupid things like worthless crypto to try to buy out the advertisers and selling out their search indexing to the highest bidder.

    Instead of just going the meta-search route by indexing by themselves; spreading out queries to multiple services; caching results; and just providing the results to users privately like a real company offering privacy would; they just gave up and let Bing do all of it.

    They could’ve even negotiated their API usage and allowed for relevant ‘in-result list ads’ that were clearly marked as Ads without compromising the privacy of their search services to help defray costs of hitting the APIs of bigger players like Google, Yahoo or Bing and allowing advertisements relevant to queries to flow without compromising on user’s privacy or letting big advertisers know who’s searching what.

    Additionally Brave has done a number of other shady things that on the surface might be advertised as helping your privacy; but really isn’t. In my opinion they should have hard-abandoned Chromium over Manifest v3 and rebased onto Firefox to keep their browser from becoming less privacy respecting overall.