Brave says private search is being misread, and iPhone users pay the price

Brave Nightly has kicked off a fresh argument over search privacy on iPhone, after amplifying a post from a user, Sooraj, that says Apple users still cannot set Brave Search as a built-in default option.

The screenshot shared in Sooraj’s post shows that on iPhone, the Search Engine menu shows just five choices: Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia. Apple’s own support page says users can change the default search engine in Safari, but only from the list Apple provides in Settings.

This is something that Brave isn’t too happy about. On its search page and in its privacy notice, the company says Brave Search is built on an independent index and does not profile users, a pitch meant to separate it from engines that lean on Google or Microsoft infrastructure.

In the new post, Brave Nightly argues many people still assume DuckDuckGo and Ecosia are the privacy-first picks on iPhone, even though both depend in part on larger search backends.

DuckDuckGo’s privacy policy says private search ads come from Microsoft Advertising, and earlier reporting in 2022 showed the company had allowed some Microsoft-owned trackers in its browser because of limits tied to its search syndication agreement. DuckDuckGo later said it would expand blocking to include Microsoft scripts, but the episode never really disappeared from privacy circles.

Ecosia does not really escape the same backend problem either. Its support pages say searches are handled through Bing and, in some cases, Google, with Microsoft and Google keeping some data for months before anonymizing it.

That does not make Ecosia identical to Bing or Google, of course, but it does cut against the simple idea that every “privacy” option on Apple’s list works on fully independent rails.

Brave, for its part, has been very active in Nightly lately, from teasing an Email Aliases feature to surfacing early builds of Brave Origin, its stripped-down browser variant now appearing in pre-release channels.

That said, the criticism from Brave against Apple isn’t new. They’ve spent years complaining that Apple’s iOS rules limit what third-party browsers can do under WebKit, even while continuing to add privacy protections to its own iPhone app.