The lawsuit said, “AI companies pay Brave to provide them with real-time online content from the Brave search index,” and use content from the Brave index “to train their own AI models” and “to respond to specific user queries.” The NYT lawsuit points to Brave’s website, which says the Brave Search API is “used by some of the biggest names in AI, including Cohere, Mistral, Perplexity, and You.com.”

The browser “blocks advertising that would otherwise appear on The Times’s website, and instead shows its own ads, offering its users a cut of the revenue even as it deprives The Times of digital advertising revenue that helps it fund the expensive effort of producing journalism,” the lawsuit said.

If this is true, this is so scummy. I’m all for paywall blocking for people, but taking away profits from news sites and turning it into profits for your company is a new low.

This Reddit post is so funny bc before this, I was about 80% more concerned about the techbro “move fast break things” mentality than the workplace culture. Security is why I’ve been a paying Proton user for 11 years, after all.

But after reading the post and OP’s comments, my concern for the workplace culture pretty much just shot up. This comment is crazy. Apparently they later edited it and changed “cowards” to “leakers” but still.

Not to mention the post has over 5000 upvotes, but every comment the OP made in it were heavily downvoted. Hmm, I wonder why! 🤔

It was 100% a PR move but it just made me more sure to cancel my Proton subscription lmao! Good job, I guess?

Can confirm, this happened to me a few years ago. Thankfully I realized it minutes after it renewed itself and managed to get a refund, but the customer service was adamant that I did not turn off auto-renew. I did. I specifically double-checked a week before my plan was supposed to expire–I always have subscription expiration dates on my calendar bc of shit like this. Deleted my account as soon as I got my money back. Fuck NordVPN.

https://pass.pears.com/privacy/

According to their privacy policy, they collect data like IP address and URL data.

When we say that we think we can process your Personal Information, it is because we considered we have a legitimate interest (for ourselves or of a third party) to do so; it is in the interest of our organization to conduct and manage our business; this includes conducting analytics to improve and optimize the Site and the services, protecting our interests and enforcing agreements with others, as well as complying with industry self-regulatory requirements. We might have legitimate interest to process Personal Information in other contexts.

Also:

As necessary, we will share your Personal Information with:
[…]
3.5. With authorities and law enforcement agencies worldwide either when ordered to do so or on a voluntary basis if this appears reasonable and necessary to us.

and

[…] Because of those retention requirements, we might not be able to honor erasure requests.