Brave puts affiliated links in the address bar

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Incident

In June 2020, it was discovered that when users typed 'binance.us' into the address bar, they were suggested the URL 'binance.us/en?ref=35089877', which included a referral code for Brave Software, Inc.

Brave Software's response

The issue was later addressed publicly by Brave's founder and CEO, Brendan Eich, who apologized and referred to the incident as a 'mistake', stating that "autocomplete should not add any code" and that the lack of disclosure was "the big problem".

The fix was shipped two days after the original incident, in stable release v1.9.80 on June 8, 2020, which set "Show Brave suggested sites in autocomplete suggestions" to off by default.

The following day, Brave published a blog post with an apology, stating their intention was to offer an "alternative completion is an affiliate-coded URL for a specific Ledger product, which the user is free to select or ignore".