Once seen as a reliable, privacy-focused web browser, new revelations shed new light on Brave’s approach to transparency.
The browser has been automatically installing its two VPN services on Windows devices without user consent since 2022. Ghacks.net reports this.
The company responded by claiming that these additional tools will only work if a user manually activates them and pays for a VPN subscription. Nevertheless, this kind of underhanded installation could be a blow to the privacy-conscious people who turned to Brave’s supposedly more secure software in the first place.
Brave’s Junk VPNs
Brave Firewall + VPN are the two burdensome applications that many Windows users most likely have installed on their computers without even knowing it. They are paid services, meaning they remain inactive unless the user subscribes and pays the $9.99 monthly fee.
Brave’s VP of Engineering, Brian Clifton, acknowledged the problem GitHub following the Ghacks report and users complaining about the unwanted tools on some online forums. As expected, people who used the browser for extra security didn’t take these new revelations very well.
“Of all the privacy tools I use, I think Brave is the most likely to go down a path I’m not comfortable with. This is an example of that,” one commenter wrote in response to a question discussion about privacy guides about the subject.
On Reddit, one user deemed the unannounced installation “borderline malware.”
Brave VPN just installed and enabled automatically? by r/brave_browser
However, Clifton assures that this will be limited to Brave’s Windows VPN, while promising to work on a solution to the problem.
He said: “The ideal situation would be to move these services to installation when VPN is first USED (after purchase) and not during installation.”
In the meantime, you can check on your PC to see if the offending tools were actually installed without your permission by going to the Services panel on your device via the Run box (Windows+R), typing services.msc and pressing Enter. Scroll through the list of installed software and click on Brave unwanted VPN services to remove them.
At the time of writing, it is still unknown whether these tools will be restored in the next update. To protect against this, we recommend that you uninstall and reinstall Brave without administrative privileges so that the software itself cannot install additional services.