tldr: My settings saying not to show Leo were ignored when I started up Brave. You should not do this.
Longer version:
I installed Brave a little while back. While it has features I very much like, it also has a lot of features I am not interested in. And so I disabled them. One such feature is Leo. I have no interest in using an LLM for any serious work because of the hallucination problem meaning I have to double check anything it says anyways.
I start up Brave today, and the Leo button that I had turned off is back. I right click to remove it, thinking it may have been a glitch. But then I click the main menu button, and I see it’s now listed in there as well. And I find no way to turn it off–not in brave:flags, and not in Settings.
This very much suggests a deliberate effort to push people who have opted out to use this feature. This is not acceptable.
Obviously people who turn off these features do not want them. It makes no sense to ignore their preferences. It only makes it seem you don’t respect your users. And that is a horrible idea in the LLM field, where trust is already low. People are obviously worried that you will harvest their data.
There are enough forum posts on this that it should be obvious that there are a significant number of people who want to opt out of Leo. Please do not keep shoving it on us.