The guy who runs the site literally works for Brave. It says so in the about page.

I’m familiar. Other than key exchange for encrypted connections, the whole point of HTTPS/TLS is establishing who you’re connecting with is who they say they are and preventing man in the middle attacks just like you described.

If your traffic was being intercepted by something like Zscaler it wouldn’t be able to provide the proper signed certificate of that web address and your browser would throw a mismatch error. IT departments using such intermediaries for https traffic inspection only get around this by installing the intermediaries’ root CA on your system so it’s not flagged by your browser or whatever you’re using for TLS traffic.

The only way someone could intercept your TLS traffic and then pass it onto you without you knowing is by having that website’s private key to sign the traffic with, which is a major security breach. As soon as something like that is discovered the certificate is revoked and a new one is issued with a different private key.

So, again, that’s just not how TLS works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure

Yup. An ISP could potentially gain some information based on the IPs you’re hitting and the number/frequency of packets sent and received, but that would take serious logging and analysis on their part. It’s much easier to collect data through DNS requests.

Yeah… that’s not how TLS works.

Oftentimes it’s done because it’s cheaper, though oftentimes it’s actually more expensive but they calculate that money from licenses post initial sale gets them more revenue and margin in the end anyway.

Still, even if it always was cheaper for the manufacturer this way, the point here is companies should not be able to control something you physically own once you have purchased it. It’s a dangerous precedent to set and things like this will creep into more and more products if we let it.