Brave appears to install VPN Services without user consent

As a reminder, Brave was created by the guy who brought you JavaScript and was later fired from Mozilla for donating to hate groups. Brave also profits from multiple forms of fraud including NFTs and affiliate hijacking.

Just a reminder, one of the largest investors in Brave is a right-wing billionaire who runs a corporate espionage agency that contracts with the US Department of Defense to spy on people.

I love it when I talked shit about this browser and get acused of wearing a tin foil hat.

Just a reminder, Brave was using people's likenesses to solicit donations without their consent, and without necessarily give those people the donations.

Uh I'll stick to Firefox thanks.

And people will still shill brave

Update: Brave plans to address the issue in a future release. The VPN service will only be installed after a user purchases the VPN.

"Oh gee whiz did we do that?! Woopsie doodle! We'll fix it someday!"

Furthermore, no data is sent to Brave from the VPN services. End

This might be true but the bigger problem is I have exactly zero reason to believe anything Brave says about the things they're installing on people's machines without consent. If you're still using Brave at this point you're a fool.

Stop using Brave, jfc. Please use Firefox, it's not the best, but it's better than this trash my goodness how many more scandals do people need to get rid of this crap?

Damn the negative stories just keep coming in regards to Brave. It’s a shame, I liked using their iOS app but I said fuck it awhile ago already. Firefox is my main b ^rowser

Checkmate, Brave shills.

Vivaldi is a better brave. You get built in ad blocking and tracking prevention along with not having built in crypto

The only chrome variant that doesn’t seem sketchy to install is chromium. The built from open source chromium. And that’s just because some sites barely function unless you’re using chrome’s rendering.

For everything else, Firefox.

If you need a Chromium browser use Ungoogled-Chromium, Windows version.

Librewolf

The amount of people I see shilling for Brave like it’s God’s gift to privacy is frankly kind of disturbing given how many issues they’ve had with privacy

the brave experience was less than ideal for me, the brave search is unusable, i switched back to firefox, which i had moved to from chrome

also, related, but a side note, word to the wise, never ever ever use a free vpn ever, someones gotta foot the bill for the exit server bandwidth, and either they're keeping logs or they're not keeping logs, but you'll never know, and you won't know when they sell their settup to the next guy. always use a major vpn service who's audited and shown proof they're not keeping logs, they're in the business of secure and private vpn service. free vpns like what brave are offering are not in that business, and server, rack space, bandwidth costs actual money

Software installs services to make its features operate, including optional default off ones. More news at 10.

Either it does it at install time, or when you try to turn on the VPN after subscribing to it, it pops an UAC prompt to finish installing optional components. That's standard practice, and it's good for security because it means they can flag the browser itself as not capable of elevating privileges. They're not going to put a gaping security hole in their software so that idiots don't write articles about "installing things without your concent". You already consented to installing Brave, you can't be surprised Brave is installed.

As long as it deletes them when you uninstall, this is a complete non-issue.

The usual anti-Brave hate wagon, with FUD and pitchforks. They're already working on it:

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/33726

VPN is a paid service, it doesn't connect to anywhere if one doesn't pay. This is just a service installed just in case. And complaining about this while using Windows , the OS with unavoidable telemetry, spyware and ads is just laughable.

Mozilla did far worse "mistakes" over the time (Pocket , Cliqz, Mr. Robot, deal with the worst privacy offenders on the Earth such as Google Facebook, Amazon, CEO pay rise while firing devs and losing market share, while begging for donations... and so on) but they somehow always get a free pass, with people swallowing Mozilla's corpo PR every single time.