You're mistaken, or misleading. Brave has never tracked users, and Brave has also never inserted affiliate links into websites. Let's discuss these claims in a bit more depth.

TRACKING

Brave doesn't track users. I invite anybody reading to take a look at their network activity; in fact, I'll sit down and give anybody an introductory walk-through of Telerik Fiddler and show them how to inspect their own network activity, to observe in plain-text what Brave is doing, and with whom it is communicating. I do this regularly, and share results [1]. You don't have to take my word on it either; unaffiliated third-parties have published similar results [2].

[1] https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff...
[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...

AFFILIATE LINKS

Brave has never "inserted affiliate links onto website". This is quite misleading. What Brave did do was offer users who were performing a search from the address bar of the browser a list of suggested results. Among those results, Brave would at times show an affiliate option.

We wrote about this on our blog (and included screenshots) for those interested [3]. Note, no data was involved. No network requests were made. There was no impact to privacy in any way, shape, or form. This was simply a suggestion offered in a drop-down beneath the address bar.

Affiliate links are a clean way for browsers (or any app, really) to generate revenue. Open up Firefox, Vivaldi, or Opera and type 'hacker news' into the address bar. In Firefox, you'll be redirected to https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hacker+ne... by default. Note the "client=firefox" in the query-string parameter list. In Opera you're sent to https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=hacker+news&sou... by default. Note the "client=opera" and "sourceid=opera" elements.

Brave's mistake was matching a fully-qualified domain name. What we had planned for was showing a set of suggested URLs (some with an affiliate code) when a user searched for something like "binance". We mistakenly showed the same results when the user typed a fully-qualified domain name, like "binance.us" as well. That was unintended, and was corrected within 48 hours of identification.

[3] https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/

SOLICITING DONATIONS

Brave is doing something quite different from other browsers; it aims to not only improve security on the Web, but also to offer novel support options to content creators everywhere in a privacy-respecting, and sustainable manner.

Brave ships with a Tipping interface to empower users to send rewards (in the form of Basic Attention Tokens) to content creators. When we launched this model, Brave gave tokens to its users, and users could give those to the sites they visit. When a user tipped a site, the tokens would go to the Creator (if verified), or into a settlement wallet to be claimed at a later date. Brave would reach out to Creators, informing them of rewards (similar to the early days of PayPal).

There were a couple issues here, which you can read about on our blog [4]. One was a UI issue. Brave marked verified domains with a checkmark (similar to Twitter's 'verified' accounts). We didn't have any special mark for non-verified properties. This was naive on our part. We remedied this by explicitly stating the status of the Creator in both cases.

The second problem was allowing tokens to move out of the user's wallet when the Creator wasn't even verified. Personally, I'm incredibly thankful that this issue was found. Under that model, tons of tokens could be dropped into a wallet, and never claimed by anybody. In the update we produced within a couple days), this model was changed. Now unverified creators wouldn't receive anything; instead, tips issued to an unverified creator would stay on your device, and be retried for up to 90 days. If the Creator verified within that timeframe, they'd collect the tips. If they didn't, the tips could be sent to somebody else.

Brave never solicited tips for anybody. There was simply a component of the browser which enabled users to send tips to sites and creators they appreciated. Brave's main fault here was with naive UI, and a contribution model which could have resulted in lost tokens. Thankfully, our users caught both issues and we were able to improve the feature quickly.

[4] https://brave.com/rewards-update/

I hope this helps.