To talk about Brave, both a browser and a search engine, is to refer to a design that, from the very beginning, put privacy at the center, which plans to offer its users a much more considerate alternative in this regard than the most prominent products and services in both markets. And so, over time, they have managed to build a great reputation that makes them the first choice of many privacy-conscious users.

The browser, which is the first of the elements of its current ecosystem, debuted on the market in early 2016, and the works to launch its search engine were first published in March 2021, when they saw the light of day. day. the first open beta a few months later in June of that year. additionallythe company started offering its own VPN service in 2020 for Android and iOS users, which moved to Windows and macOS earlier this year, expanding its reach.

Let’s remember that Brave VPN is not free, unlike the basic VPN built into, for example, Opera. Its price is $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year, and for this amount we can protect the communication of up to five devices. For those who need to be able to use this Brave service on multiple devices, it is possible to add them by paying an additional two dollars monthly fee for each one.

Screenshot taken on my PC while writing this message.

As we already told you when starting the desktop version, in the case of Windows it is necessary to install a separate application, since the protection applies to all network traffic of the device, not just the browser. What we didn’t know and didn’t expect is what we can read in Android Police, and that’s it Brave will install two services from its VPN+Firewall software on Windows, even if the user is not contracted for these features.

That’s right, yes services are not activated automatically, that is, they remain inactive until their use is necessary, that is, until the user contracts (if he does so) with Brave VPN. However, this is something that shouldn’t be happening, as acknowledged by Brian Clifton, VP of Engineering at Brave, who responded to the publication in a GitHub thread acknowledging the issue and stating that they are already working on a fix. , that is, these services are not installed in Windows unless they are necessary.

Compared to what we have seen in other browsers, this is not a big problem, but it is true that installing unnecessary components on systems It’s a bad practice that can also lead to other security issues, something that, as great privacy advocates (and rightfully so, I don’t deny), they should be more careful than their competitors. So this isn’t a cliffhanger, but more of a slap on the wrist to pay more attention to these details.