Perhaps surprisingly, Brave founder and CEO Brendan Eich (famous for creating JavaScript and helping co-found Mozilla) quickly admitted a “serious error of judgement”, tweeting:

What this means is that Brave users searching for Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange, would have had their query autocompleted so that they ended up on a special version of the Binance homepage that lets the company know that Brave’s address bar was the origin of that visit.Īutocomplete, of course, is a feature all web browsers offer and is intended as a time-saving and normally uncontroversial convenience (in Brave, ‘Autocomplete searches and URLs’ can be turned on or off by typing ‘ brave://settings/autofill’ into the address bar).īut not long after, a second user discovered a GitHub page containing code used to embed rival cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase, Trezor, and Ledger in the same way.Īt that point, Brave found itself fielding unhappy comments from users asking whether this behaviour was consistent with the company’s idealistic motto ‘Brave for a better internet’ and general championing of privacy (the latter being a virtue it recently lived up to in an independent University study). So when you are using the browser and type in ‘’ you end up getting redirected to ‘/en?ref=35089877’ – I see what you did there mates.

The first user to notice the issue was Cryptonator 1337, who tweeted the following observation on 6 June: The Brave browser has provoked unhappiness among some of its users after being caught redirecting searches to affiliate links that earned it commission.

Brave spyware