Brave advertises itself as a fast, secure, and private web browser, but it’s been caught quietly earning revenue by redirecting users through affiliate links for certain search queries.
As Decrypt reports, the redirects were first spotted by Twitter user @cryptonatore1337 who discovered that if you type binance.us into Brave, you end up being redirected to binance.us/en?ref=35089877, which is an affiliate link Brave earns revenue from. Binance is a cryptocurrency exchange service, but it’s not the only one Brave has been quietly attaching affiliation to. Ledger, Trezor, and Coinbase URLs are also being changed to affiliate versions.
Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave, has apologized and offered an explanation via multiple tweets, saying, “We made a mistake, we’re correcting: Brave default autocompletes verbatim “http://binance.us” in address bar to add an affiliate code. We are a Binance affiliate, we refer users via the opt-in trading widget on the new tab page, but autocomplete should not add any code … The autocomplete default was inspired by search query clientid attribution that all browsers do, but unlike keyword queries, a typed-in URL should go to the domain named, without any additions. Sorry for this mistake — we are clearly not perfect, but we correct course quickly.”
Eich points out that autocomplete adding affiliate links can be turned off in the browser’s settings, but it’s turned on by default when installed. He also suggested Brave wasn’t hiding the fact this happened as it’s been in the source code “for months.” Understandably, the revelation Brave does this has been met with anger and a loss of trust. As of last week, Brave was celebrating passing 15 million active monthly users, but that growth could certainly stall now, even if Joe Rogan just backed the browser.
