User agent sovereignty would be nice... except the most used browser and 1/2 of smartphones are controlled by Google, the largest ad tracking company on the planet.
We're way past the 90s.
But I do agree with you that "free market tech" created the problem of "tracking cookies are ubiquitous and users don't know how to control them". But then regulators just layered another annoyance on top of that, instead of solving that actual problem.
Also never forget we already had a perfectly good solution in the form of Do Not Track headers that a benevolent governing body would have simply mandated abiding by. Instead we have this shithole.
The only way it ever would have been respected if it was required to cryptographically sign an acceptance of cookies, then the server was required to retain that attestation as proof of acceptance, subject to legal liability if they were found in possession of tracking data without a valid attestation.
Absent enforceability, even when the server actively and maliciously decided to ignore it, it was a toothless solution.
The rub here is that everyone wanted to ignore DNT, because it made them lots and lots of money.
Brave has shown that we can have an user agent that is aligned with the user, even if the browser engine is made by Google.
I'd say it's probably not a good day for Brave advocacy. Neither is any other day.
For the record: go back to the article that you are (wrongly) alluding to [0] and see how much the author has retracted. Also, see the response from Brave's Chief of Search.
I "have" to keep advocating them because all the opposition that is presented is always based on false information, biased and prejudiced and clearly made by people who never used the browser or tried to understand the value proposition.
There are tons of things to criticize about Brave (their "partnerships" with Binance and Solana, their complete lack of interest in making BAT an actual currency for payments online, them completely losing the train of decentralized social media) but none of that ever comes up from the detractors, only this kind of bullshit like the one you bring up.
[0]: https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai...
The Brave Search API does not respect the site's licensing, and Brave is under the assumption that 1) because they are a search engine and 2) because they attribute the URI of data - this puts them in the clear to scrape and resell data word-for-word.
Brave steals data and resells it, and is not to be considered a trustworthy entity.
