technology

Brave Software, the company behind the browser of the same name, was founded by Brendan Eich. He's best known as the creator of JavaScript from his days at Netscape Communications, and he was later the co-founder of Mozilla. He remained at Mozilla Foundation and its for-profit segment, Mozilla Corporation, well into the 2000s. In 2014, he was appointed as CEO of Mozilla Corporation, which immediately caused backlash from at least a few people inside Mozilla and many people outside the organization.

Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Eich wrote a blog post defending himself in 2012, when the donation was initially discovered, where did not apologize and denied the donation made him a bigot:

Here's a bonus fun fact: one of those early investors was Founders Fund, which is operated by billionaire Peter Thiel. He's a regular campaign donor to far-right political candidates, and said in an essay that "I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible." He also keeps funding libertarian “seasteading” ships designed to function as independent cities in international waters (think BioShock), all of which have failed miserably.

Brave was also caught up in a privacy scandal in 2020, when it was revealed that the browser was adding affiliate codes to some URLs typed into the address bar. For example, typing in “binance.us” would add Brave’s affiliate link to the end, allowing Brave Software to collect revenue from signups or purchases. An official blog post called that “a mistake,” and the functionality was later turned off. That should have been enough to swear off Brave as a privacy-centric browser forever, considering the entire point of affiliate links is to collect data about the user and traffic source. For example, when you click an Amazon affiliate link in a web article, the publisher can see the exact products you purchase in the timeframe the tracking cookie remains active (which is currently 24 hours).