Brave puts affiliated links in the address bar

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 8 June 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".

Consumer response

Coverage of the incident described criticism from users of the browser. PCMag wrote that the revelation had been met with anger and a loss of trust, noting that Brave had celebrated passing 15 million active monthly users the week before.

A Hacker News thread about the incident drew 361 comments. Users on Reddit stated that they had uninstalled the browser, with some noting that the fix turned the feature off by default rather than removing it.

Privacy commentator David Gerard wrote that the insertion ignored legally required disclosures for affiliate links, noting that the United States Federal Trade Commission has required full disclosure of affiliate marketing since 2009. Decrypt reported that critics argued Eich was apologizing simply because he had been caught. A Brave spokesperson told CoinDesk that the default for the "Show Brave suggested sites in autocomplete suggestions" setting had already been changed to off in the Nightly release channel.