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Comment by SahAssar | Hacker News Reader

> Web privacy focused people begin thinking of Brave someday turning on the VPN service and tunneling your traffic through VPN nodes they control with nefarious intent.

No, it is more that any one company that installs unwanted stuff on my computer is probably not some thing I trust as a privacy-focused software. Besides that VPN services have extremely broad permissions to look at or modify traffic, so it might be a attack target if not properly secured (which it might not be if it was "accidentally" installed). It also might signal that brave is looking to become a much broader company besides their current browser-crypto-ads thing, which is worrying for privacy.

There are many reasons for an accidentally or not-really-accidentally vpn service being installed behind the users back is alarming.

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> It also might signal that brave is looking to become a much broader company besides their current browser-crypto-ads thing, which is worrying for privacy

Soft agree, while noting that from their perspective, browsers are not a profitable offering, so they likely _need_ to expand to a broader product offering, without grant funding. Google has their obvious reasons for being in the browser market, Firefox receives grants if I remember correctly, Safari I assume only exists so Apple can attempt to keep people in their walled garden of software offerings. How do the maintainers of Brave get to make a living? Either by selling you something or selling you. I'd rather them try to sell me something, personally.

That said, I'm a current Brave user that still has one foot in the door for Firefox. If they keep this up, I might be back.

Sure, but that is worrying from a privacy perspective. For any other venture their value is their current installed base so they will probably try to use that either via bundling (as might have been the case here) or via cross-marketing (which is usually not privacy-friendly).

Either way I think a privacy-focused company not making enough money to survive on their (hopefully privacy-focused) products is not a good thing. Brave has been going through this for quite some time with BAT and crypto ads, mozilla has been going through it even longer with bloating expenses and google income.

Safari and Firefox development are both pretty much funded by Google paying them to be the default search engine. (Which is obviously hilarious from a privacy perspective)

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