• TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.mlM
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      1 year ago

      By August 2016, the company had received at least US$7 million in angel investments from venture capital firms, including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Propel Venture Partners, Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, and the Digital Currency Group.

      Here’s an archived version of Brave’s Wikipedia article in case that information disappears somehow See the section #Business model

      https://web.archive.org/web/20200227000950/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

      Peter Thiel is the chairman of Palantir Technologies. Wikipedia describes Palantir Technologies like this:

      https://web.archive.org/web/20200128121847/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

      Palantir Technologies is a private American software company that specializes in big data analytics. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, it was founded by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp.

      Further along the Wikipedia article, some interesting stuff starts coming up:

      The company is known for three projects in particular: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Metropolis and Palantir Foundry. Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense, fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor, while Palantir Metropolis is used by hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms.

      Which is really concerning if you ask me. This is also in line with how Brave whitelists Facebook and Twitter tracking scripts while advertising itself as a privacy conscious browser. Seems like a honeypot to me.

      • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Literally named after a contraption used by Sauron, imho that’s another red flag right here

      • zephyrvs@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        You’re right, it’s definitely fishy and his claim doesn’t seem to hold up. According to Wellfound (previously Angellist) Brave was seed funded by Founders Fund with 4,5mil USD, which brings them close to owning 10% of Brave, though possibly with some dilution, because Chinese company Qihoo 360 provided 2,5mil USD in seed funding in 2015 already. I don’t think it’s likely that any “[…] first floor engineers at Brave” have a bigger equity, if I’m not completely misunderstanding how these equity valuations work.

        It’s definitely suspicious. Since I’m inbetween moving browsers from Chrome to Brave right now, I’ll have to dig deeper into this and maybe switch to Firefox again. Though Mozilla has their own issues.

        Sigh. Thanks for your reply!

      • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        He’s also a big proponent of the destruction of Western systems, a “libertarian”, founded the right wing Stanford review, and, along with bff Elon (whom he described as a psychopath) have openly stated their goal to bring down the central banks and institute their own form of currency.

        He also had a major hand in starting the silicon bank run.

        Oh. And he’s an actual member of the Bilderberg group.

        Peter Thiel is evil incarnate.

        • CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
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          1 year ago

          Also this. Surprising so many on the right support people like this when he’s the literal personification of all their adrenochrome/deep state conspiracy nonsense.

    • AphoticDev@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      I think the annoymousjoker summed it up nicely, but let me add that anytime you have venture capital funds investing millions into your product, it means they think it’s going to make them a lot of money. Since you’re not paying for Brave, you need to ask yourself how are they returning on that investment? And the answer to that is that anytime a corporation offers a service for free, it’s because the product they’re making money off of isn’t the service, the product is you and your data.