undefined | Better HN

0 pointsthe_duke3y ago0 comments

The difficulty is , as always, incentives.

Brave is an ad company, in the sense that their only revenue is from ads.

Brave has every motivation to make external tracking as useless as possible, because it increases the relative competitiveness of their own ad platform. Since they own the browser, they can track as much as they want. I'm not saying that they do this today, their implementation might be very privacy focused right now.

I also appreciate that you need money to maintain a browser, even if it's just a layer on top of Chromium.

But we've seen again and again that maximizing revenue always wins out in the long term.

As long as primary revenue for Brave is ads I don't see why I should trust them any more than Google. Less so in fact, because Google doesn't depend on Chrome to generate revenue. For them it's just a helpful sidekick.

0 comments

koheripbal3y ago

> Brave is an ad company, in the sense that their only revenue is from ads.

This is like saying non-profits are donation companies. It's stretching the definition to make a point and ultimately circular logic.

approxim8ion3y ago

> This is like saying non-profits are donation companies

Not sure how true that is. Non profits definitely rely on donations as their sole income, and are incentivized to take actions to maximize donations, but the difference is that (ideally) they can't really line their own pockets with the income that comes in. So the only reason they would maximize their income is to put more money into the things that they do.

This is not the case with Brave. The browser is a front, or a channel, for their token and ad network. They only need to keep the browser part of it functional enough to keep traffic. They have no real incentive to improve the browser beyond that point, especially if other competitors stagnate and the money keeps coming in.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse