festivecake

Copying from another comment:

Well, a lot of reporting on the affiliate code situation partly mischaracterized what actually happened. There was an auto-complete suggestion that was auto-selecting when you pressed "enter", and it was fixed shortly thereafter. There is a blog post about it called "On Partner Referral Codes in Brave Suggested Sites".

That said, it does essentially the same thing Firefox does when you do a search on Firefox. Try right now: go into Firefox, type in a search in the URL bar, press enter, and you'll see it appends/"injects" a Firefox "affiliate code" as a query parameter so that Firefox gets a cut from Google. One salient difference is that Firefox's "affiliate code" is a vanity code (human readable: "?client=firefox-b-d"), so it isn't viscerally shocking.

If it read "?client=brave" like it does on Firefox, it's very likely no one would have ever cared!

This comment is just irresponsible.

Different flavour of mystery sauce

There's no "mystery sauce". It's completely open-source.

You're still having all the analytics captured, it just goes to somebody with far less scrutiny than Google.

Brave's completely open about its analytics, and they're designed specially to be privacy-preserving. (No, it's not some naive "anonymous identifier".)

https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/

And you can also turn them completely off.

It doesn't. That comment is just irresponsibly false.

This is the extent of Brave's analytics: https://brave.com/privacy-preserving-product-analytics-p3a/

You can also disable it completely.

Well, a lot of reporting on the affiliate code situation partly mischaracterized what actually happened. There was an auto-complete suggestion that was auto-selecting when you pressed "enter", and it was fixed shortly thereafter. There is a blog post about it called "On Partner Referral Codes in Brave Suggested Sites".

That said, it does essentially the same thing Firefox does when you do a search on Firefox. Try right now: go into Firefox, type in a search in the URL bar, press enter, and you'll see it appends/"injects" a Firefox "affiliate code" as a query parameter so that Firefox gets a cut from Google. One salient difference is that Firefox's "affiliate code" is a vanity code (human readable: "?client=firefox-b-d"), so it isn't viscerally shocking.

If it read "?client=brave" like it does on Firefox, it's very likely no one would have ever cared!