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