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Comment by DevKoala | Hacker News Reader

Brave is trying to fix the broken ad-tech industry with a monopoly on the decision of what gets tracked and what doesn't. I am not behind it at all.

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Respectfully, you're not at all correct. Brave is aiming to cut out the tracking entirely. No user tracking. That's our default, out of the box behavior.

Brave Ads, which is an optional component, also will not track the user. Local machine-learning will decide what willing users are interested in, and whether or not to show them particular ads.

The Brave Ads system is antithetical to the current form of digital advertising. Rather than radiating personal information to innumerable third parties, you secure your data on your device, and let your device privately and securely determine what you would like, or would not like, to see.

"Local machine-learning will decide what willing users are interested in, and whether or not to show them particular ads."

How are you countering my claim? It is trying to establish a monopoly on the ad-targeting protocol. Brave is not a regulated party, and as well-intended as Brave could be, all it essentially doing is moving one part of the architecture to the client, and granting control over it to a single party.

Google used to "do no evil" what guarantees Brave will not?

You're downplaying the implication of "moving one part of the architecture to the client". This inversion of the model means the user is sovereign over their data. It means ad fraud (responsible for billions lost) is dealt a massive blow. It means the publisher doesn't have to watch hand after hand take from their revenue before it reaches them. It means the user, finally, can get paid for the limited commodity called "Attention".

As for what guarantees Brave won't do evil, look at our design principles. When it came to syncing data from one device to another, we designed it in such a way that we could never see what data was moving from device to device. Encryption on the machine shields all eyes, including our own, from your data. Consider also Payments--the user's ability to support content creators. Even here we implemented the ANONIZE protocol to protect your anonymity and privacy. That alone wasn't satisfactory, so we also channel the info through a VPN to mask your location as well.

All that we do remains open, and engineered in such a way that Brave couldn't abuse your trust even if we wanted to. This future friendly principle ensures that Brave couldn't turn sour on you in the future; not without a massive re-engineering effort beforehand. But even then, all of our code is open and auditable.

Google was "Don't be evil," but Brave is "Can't be evil." The difference is subtle, yet profound.

Theoretically, could the (server-side) records of which ads the local machine learning decided to serve be reverse engineered to extract most of tracking info?

Local AI keeps sending this guy ads for shoes and cottage cheese == this guys keeps searching for shoes and cottage cheese?

There will definitely be clever attempts to game the system, but bringing the experience into the browser, and onto the user's device, gives us the home advantage.

We have a passionate group of security-minded folks internally who have been exploring ways to game the system, and closing those holes preemptively.

I'd love to see us publish something in the future about specific types of attacks which work on the present-day model, but not on our model. Additionally, what types of new attacks could be possible, and how we've prepared.

Suffice it to say, having the home-field (the user's machine) advantage is going to play well in our favor.

Great topic!

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