My worry is many of those posts are assumptions being made without any evidence at all of anything actually happening - yes someone can be a chairman of two companies, but does he have the means to exchange data between the two, are the two companies in fact passing any information, and has this actually been observed? Thiel is a known investor who invests for profit. Yes he is also a board member of Facebook (who we know we cannot trust as we know about Cambridge Analytics and similar issues, as well as the WhatsApp privacy policy issues - all widely reported with evidence), but again we can’t just assume now that Brave data is in fact being passed to Facebook - it is not mentioned for example in the privacy policy like it was in WhatsApp’s privacy policy. I like to see some evidence of something happening, otherwise everything ends up being linked to everything else without any basis. Google pays Firefox to have their search engine as a default, but does that mean Firefox is passing private data back to Google? We don’t know for sure, but if we don’t yet have evidence about it, should we automatically now condemn Firefox by association?

Other issues like the link redirect did actually happen, but have been fixed - https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-browser-brave-busted-for-autocompleting-urls-to-versions-it-profits-from/. So it happened, but is no longer the case. Yes it casts some doubt, but every company has to ethically make their money somehow otherwise they don’t exist. They should not make it that way, though, and hopefully they learnt their lesson

Then we see studies like this at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/27/brave-beats-other-browsers-in-privacy-study/ which puts Brave first in terms of the least privacy data that leaks back “home” out of a number of browsers.

In my mind, I then come back to: Do I give more weight to a study or to a few posts that speculate some connections? I’m not saying either that I now pronounce Brave to be 100% secure and private: But I’m not seeing evidence to the contrary.

Firefox has been too slow for me, and although I really liked Vivaldi, I was not happy with their business model about keeping their improvements as closed source (in case someone else used it, they say). One could also speculate there - are they hiding something in there, but we don’t know because it’s closed.