don’t use Brave.

Yes its a decent piece of software made by some properly smart industry experts but I have zero faith in them on a personal trust level. The CEO (despite his amazing resume and past accomplishments) is an arsehole, a bigot, a crypto-scammer and a science denier.

The data-point that someone is using a dumbphone or actively trying to minimise/restrict profiling is a very important and valuable profiling data-point itself.

They don’t need to listen to you to know exactly what you are thinking.

The average tech user likely has no idea how accurate these profiles can be without active listening.

Same issue hit me, some government and banking services wouldn’t accept my .info and .services domains, so I have a backup .com for those.

Wish I didn’t need it though, its 2025.

I use Ad-Guard instead of Pihole because the pi-hole software used to be missing some of the DNS features I wanted at the time, and I just stuck with it ever since. I have the main DNS server running on my Unraid Box, and a backup that runs on my HomeAssistant Pi4B.

I have .solutions and .info domain emails that still gets denied by some services, especially anything government or public utility, pain in the arse.

You’d think that at least .info would be pretty well accepted by now.

Brave is (or at least, was) a good browser technically (as good as any Chromium implementation), at least while it still has the ability to turn off their crypto crap, the proxy/vpn integration and run a “clean” version, but I highly doubt those options will remain forever the way their wankbag of a CEO seems to want to go with it, he can not be trusted.

So no I cant say I trust them anymore, they will make money from you, in increasingly devious ways.

There are many, many better “Clean” browsers out there like Librewolf that are a better way to go.

yea they don’t mask your purchases, though it would be nice for that to be a more easily available service.

I do like that my banks app automatically categorises things based on those descriptions so I can get analytics on my own purchases to keep track of spending, but sometimes you just want to mask a purchase without having to go through something like PayPal.