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Users' right to block is well supported by web standards and case law. Adding a separate, direct to creator funding option is not parasitism, it is found money for creators.
To see someone here call our opt-in (meaning that each user consents without duress) anonymous micro-contributions and (coming up fast) private ads model layered on top such a name tells me that person has confused host and parasite, or is working for one of the parasites.
It was never a given that your browser should become a blind and passive servant to surveillance super-companies either wholly or partly dependent on ads, but such companies did capture arguably 3 of the top 4 browsers.
Now is the time for users to push back, whether by Brave if you like it, a blocker such as uBO on a browser that doesn't track you by default (perhaps when "logged in"; whatever), or another method that works for you. I hope those who have not yet will give Brave a try. https://brave.com/download-dev for the chromium-extensions-ready new version.
True, but replacing ads you don't get compensated for with ads you do, is.
In 2016 we proposed that Brave, a browser, could allow users and publishers to get better revenue through a private ad model that does not entail any tracking or user data in the clear on servers. We ran some placeholder ads to show the concept off. These are disabled now.
This caused a reaction. The letter we got (I mentioned it in my last comment) from a publisher group asserted that the publishers own copyright and trademark on third-party ads on their sites. This was comical in view of malware getting on the New York Times, BBC Online, AOL and other sites the month before (March 2016). Publishers do not own (c) or (tm) on any ads they don't create, of course -- certainly not on so-called third party ads, especially malware. Or they'd be liable.
Anyway, baseline Brave is just a top-speed (better than using JS in extension code) blocker by default. All token options are optional, users and (if involved) publishers choose.
In this sense, all browsers insert the vast majority of ads today. Intermediary businesses insert scripts before, during, and after ads too. Browsers and extensions may block scripts.
The part of the ad ecosystem that Brave transposes to the browser, again if and only if each user and (if in the deal: ad slot in page, not in user space) publisher agrees, is the matching of ad to context including user interest, and the attribution and confirmation of ad view or interaction. This is done without any tracking or user data on servers — including our servers. Also no user fingerprinting on any blockchain, it is super-important to avoid this.
How matching works: if you opt into the ad system, you get a catalog, same as everyone gets in a large region speaking the same natural language. The catalog lists edge url and metadata on each ad or offer. It compresses well and slowly updates. Downloading it or updating it with new ad deals for all in the region/language does not identify you. We have started with global/English for trials.
Local machine learning studies local data, again only if you opt in. This agent sees the sum of all user inputs to the browser: search queries (you own your query log — the search engine does not and the agent does not scrape search results, just user inputs and navigation); e-commerce form filling and buying; social graph edges from you to your friends; tab and window constellations; scrolling on actually viewed content.
With our secret-key cross device sync option, your data can be a full cross device view of your browsing, and only you have the key to decrypt this data. We cannot see it, we see only encrypted blobs in cloud storage. QR code and camera pairing with secret key as wordlist are what you see and do, to use Brave Sync (user testing soon).
Say you are shopping for a new camera during lunch, but on most days go back to work after lunch. The agent knows this and does not bug you too soon. But later, after work, when you are idle, an OS notification floats a brief call to action ad (like a search ad, a few lines of text and minimal image branding). This self dismisses but you can find it in Brave. If you click the View button, Brave is focused if not already and a new tab opens with a full landing page ad or offer.
You can thumbs-down on the ad if it didn’t work. You can close the tab whenever you like. You are not identified to the ad’s brand or any other party by opening tab — Brave shields are still up. But if you like the ad, you can act on it. You get 70% of the gross, which can be large for lead-gen ads such as making a test drive appointment with a car dealer.
Publisher ads work similarly and can even place just based on page context, not on any local user data. We always give the ad space owner 70%. We always pay the user >= what we make.
If you just form an impression, view a video by quartiles, even click on a download button for an app, or open further pages, you are not identified. Chaum blind certificates attest to your ad actions but without any user identifier. We already use the ANONIZE protocol for anonymous contributions to your top sites and YouTube accounts.
In no case do you identify to any party, including us, as a tracked user — unless you choose to, in a clear page in tab aka first party setting.
Did you run some comparison to back this? I would love to see some numbers.
If anyone wants to benchmark, results welcome, but we do not view uBO on Chrome as competition -- rather we cooperate on blocking tech where we can with @gorhill et al. We are out to take unblocked Chrome user share.
I understand that you are not competing with uBlock. But I’m always a bit sceptical when I read that it’s faster because it’s C++. Since it is not necessarily true and some measurement is needed before being able to reach this conclusion. I understand though that blocking from the network gives some (constant factor?) advantage compared to a JavaScript extension.
I've been doing browsers since JS was super-slow, advocated its use in Mozilla XUL UX back in the day without it being an issue _per se_, watched JITting JS engines make it even less of an issue for such 10Hz or even 60fps deadlines when done right -- but C++ over JS and in same process vs. multiprocess matters for blocking, due in large part to how many requests there are, and how they affect page rendering.
We are benchmarking again now that we have staff, so I'll try to update here if I do get any results. I don't believe we are yet testing vs. uBO+Chrome, though, for the reason given. We are allies.
No point repeating something you heard a while ago from the NAA when they wrote a "Cease and Desist" letter to us that did not contain those words (because we weren't doing anything to cease or desist). All our opt-in models require consent.
User-private ads go in user-owned channels (notifications and tabs), not in publisher inventory, if the user opts in. User gets 70%.
On android it is essentially identical to Chrome in every way apart from the Brave icon next to the address bar that controls the blocking.
I really like it.
I tried the desktop version though and did not like the look and feel of the UI - tabs under the address bar etc. Felt like it was a slavish copy of Safari and I did not like it. Much prefer Firefox on desktop.
I have also learnt of Brave's plans to replace a sites ads with its own ads which I do not like. Will move off of Brave on mobile when Firefox is workable on android (last time I tried it was awful, clunky and slow on android).
Also (to anyone who doesn't know) you can install Firefox addons on Firefox mobile, so uBlock Origin works (can personally confirm it) to block ads.
Try https://brave.com/download-dev for better desktop browser that is coming to stable very soon. Almost all chromium extensions work - any using Google accounts/sync do not.
Cutting advertisers off at the knees does, and as a stance it isn’t subject to being degraded through its relationship to advertisers and their money.
If you think the web can do without $100B in US on digital this year, ~$250B globally that goes through ads, then please demonstrate replacement funding models, or just show some evidence of any that could scale that big.
We can't count ads out, but by lifting 3rd party to 1st ad context (avoids brand safety and reverse: bad ads on good content), aligning interests, and cutting out all the trackers and other intermediaries that evolved because browsers were passive slaves to the system, we hope to more than replace the value of our users to publishers that was "lost" via our users blocking by default.
I’ll stick with Firefox, as Mozilla is the only organization users can truly trust today for their privacy
I am among the founders of Mozilla, and I'll speak only about what is public and happened or at least started while I was there:
1. We rejected 3rd party cookie blocking patches, three times. Safari has had a blocker from birth.
2. We got too dependent on Google revenue shares while Google turned from search (1st party ads) to full surveillance (1st and 3rd) superpower.
3. Tracking protection work that started while I was there was delayed for years, then allowed only in private tabs, then a pref was added. Now, after Safari and Brave have taken the lead, Mozilla is turning on tracking protection in some form by default (which is good).
The claim that Mozilla is the only organization users can truly trust for privacy is belied by these facts.
You may not care; I care about some but not others so do not take this as me twisting your arm. But "I'm all right Jack" is a bad attitude in view of the fact that ad-funding is required for millions of sites today.
You’re selling an ICO based on that premise, I’d argue that yes you do very much need to convince at least some people of that. In addition I’d argue that you need to convince people (against the evidence of their own experience) that the majority of the “visible web” isn’t a dumpster fire that would be better off dead.
It's great you don't like most content. Who does? Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is shit) has not been repealed. But we do not all agree on which 90%, and even the top 10% by many measures needs ads. Why are you trying to make your animus against ads into a universal? Seems cultish.
I had an issue where my firefox browser was great, but the other apps on my phone were extremely noisy with ad networks. This would compliment an ad blocked Brave/Firefox browser nicely.
Nothing against Blokada, but as a realist using ad blockers (not just Brave), I need more than domain blocking these days.
Why do you think this? What have we done to give you this impression? Our primary focus is to protect the user's rights online, and to create a sustainable experience for content creators.
I cannot argue with that, I very much agree. But plenty of people not only like consuming what I deem hot garbage, they're more than comfortable supporting it via ads; something I would never subject myself to if given a chance.
But I don't believe I should be able to dictate how other people experience their content or how they fund it, and there are still mountains of ad-supported content that is actually good and that would likely be non-viable on a patronage/subscription system due to things such as their target demographics.
So, Brave seems to tick our own boxes of "no ads" and provides the option for others to subject themselves to them. Unless we're arguing for going back to the old "pre-mainstream" Internet (to which I say, there are many places for that, and the Tor network is particularly fertile for fostering such a culture) then I say the Brave model improves the situation on every front.
Anyway, as the last sentence reminds, attacking us based on compensation shows a strange double standard. The huge super-surveillance companies pay people way more than we make, and they do it by raiding user privacy, page load time, radio and so battery life and data plan, and safety from malvertising.
We are out to transplant -- with user consent always, creator too if they are involved -- the necessary minimum viable ads components into a clean ecosystem, to capture some of the huge funding from ad spend ($100B in US on digital this year) and give 70% or 85% to user or user+creator. See other replies on how our ad model preserves privacy.
“Right now” is doing some terribly hard work in that claim.
The question you seem to be avoiding by tone-policing in wake of attacking my motives is whether ad spend can be replaced quickly enough to save the "good" content. Perhaps it is time to let the ad-funded world burn, and rebuild afterward. I'm not yet convinced, so excuse me for trying to reform ad-spend rather than just go for baseline blocking + optional voluntary anonymous token contributions, and no other option.
Did I really? Looking back over our brief exchange I’m not seeing it, you just seemed to use my supposed impropriety as a justification to turn this into a fight. It’s a pattern that seems to hold throughout comments on this thread when you’re questioned on the ethics or wisdom of BAT. A more cynical person would suspect that your position is sufficiently untenable that you’re employing a bit of the dead cat strategy.
Why is your only recourse, on the question of how to replace ad funding and keep even just the top 10% of the web alive, to attack our motives or ethics? Better to give a plausible version of how our rejecting ads, even skipping tokens for anonymous donations it seems, and just blocking to burn the ad-funded world down a little faster, leads to a better wider world later.
It’s also worth pointing out that I’ve explained the core issue I have with your plan have nothing to do with your motives or ethics. I’m not sure how many times I need to repeat the idea that something like uBlock Origin is a superior performer, and “but the ad-supported content!” argument is unmoving for reasons I’ve already stated. It’s not that I’ve failed offered a broader perspective, it’s just that you’ve focused a lot on what you perceive as a personal attack, despite it being nothing of the sort.
But what I'm asking you to do, as a better course of action, or on top if you prefer, is say what "existing solutions" are superior and why they win. We started with baseline ad blocking and some of our users, who see the ecosystem problem of free-riding (which you still dismiss), asked us to build an option for giving back. So we prototyped with Bitcoin, and when that got expensive and cut off users who could not buy it, we created the Basic Attention Token instead.
Again if you dislike our ethics, no need to rehash. But I'm still interested in how you think pure blocking, AKA "free riding", will result in a superior outcome for anyone in the long run. Publisher revenues have been falling for years, decades if you look at newspapers. How do your top ten sites keep their lights on?
I’m done with attempts to frame yourself or your “team” as a wronged party.
But what I'm asking you to do, as a better course of action, or on top if you prefer, is say what "existing solutions" are superior and why they win. We started with baseline ad blocking and some of our users, who see the ecosystem problem of free-riding (which you still dismiss)
I don’t dismiss it, I encourage it. I’ve actively stated several times that it’s a model in need of a bullet in the neck. I’ve pointed out that much ad-supported content and “journalism” exists on a scale between useless and toxic. Moreover, the ad industry itself is inseparable from the industry of information brokering, creating demand for crap, and the subsequent environmental catastrophe of modern consumer culture. The death of it, and the noisy bollocks which exists to draw attention to it would be a good thing. Given their history they don’t deserve more chances, and it’s reasonable to suspect that even if they started off allowing for good intentions, over time the envelope would be pushed until we were back where we are now.
I understand that you disagree with what I’m saying on several levels, but the good news is that ad blocking is free and easy, not to mention popular compared to what you’re attempting.
asked us to build an option for giving back. So we prototyped with Bitcoin, and when that got expensive and cut off users who could not buy it, we created the Basic Attention Token instead. Again if you dislike our ethics, no need to rehash. But I'm still interested in how you think pure blocking, AKA "free riding", will result in a superior outcome for anyone in the long run. Publisher revenues have been falling for years, decades if you look at newspapers. How do your top ten sites keep their lights on?
Less noise, more signal. Will “free riding” kill loads of clickbait, outrage factories, and “journalism” that is really a collection of affiliate links? Yes, and it’s a feature, not a bug. As a bonus it could even encourage a more functional and less societally destructive means of remuneration for content creators that isn’t mediated by profiteering sociopaths who call themselves advertisers.
But in the interest of greater knowledge, I'll try one more time to get something less broad that addresses risk. Here is a top-by-revenue-and-subscriptions publisher trade group. They get 80% in aggregate of revenue from ads, are shifting away from ads, but cannot drop ads. Ideas other than high dose rad & chemotherapy (to use your "cancerous" trope) welcome.
https://static.mozilla.com/moco/en-US/pdf/2014_Mozilla_Found...
My browser is for reading docs, for JS/WASM development, and the occasional Gmail or HN visit, so maybe I'm not their target market.
[0] https://basicattentiontoken.org/BasicAttentionTokenWhitePape...
BTW, chromium bloat rep in part comes from Chrome not blocking ads and tracking well. Extensions must use JS and so use more memory. Brave uses C++ in the network threads of the browser process.
Content creators are strong armed into becoming verified publishers, while users have to trust Brave that their data is handled properly and carefully.
What's the alternative to Brave's model? I personally will keep using Firefox with an adblocker and publishers will get nothing.
Besides if I REALLY wanted to I could run one of the GPL forks of Firefox. They may be dated after a while but they work usually.
Edit: I meant to say GNU forks like IceWeasel and GNU IceCat which are licensed as GPL usually. There's other forks too.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_...
and
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_IceCat
They basically use scripts that build IceCat apparently from the original source code. I'm guessing they diff against FireFox.
Can you elaborate more?
That's the short version.
It's pitched as a way to allow people like me who won't browse without an adblocker a way to contribute to sites we like.
They have their own token (with ICO and all that) and you can pay websites through that. I am quite sceptical about that.
We block third-party ads and trackers because they have been leverage to spread malware, inject crypto-mining scripts into pages, push malicious extension onto unsuspecting users, and more. Not to mention, the entire model of unannounced tracking is in stark contrast to GDPR and relevant legislation.
The user ought to be sovereign over their machine, their experience, and their data. That is what Brave believes.
We understand that blocking ads and trackers will result in some impact to many websites. It is for this reason we created the User Growth Pool during our token sale, setting aside 300M Basic Attention Tokens.
For several months we have been channeling the UGP funds into the wallets of content creators. We do this via regular, monthly grants to users (which wind up going to their top sites), referral links which pay $5 in BAT for every user you bring to the Brave platform, contests (such as our 100K BAT giveaway), and more.
We understand that has helpful as the UGP is, it won't be there forever. As such, the web needs to be sustained by some other means. This is why we're developing Brave Ads.
Brave Ads is a completely-opt-in digital advertising model which doesn't leak private data, doesn't reward fraudsters and scammers, and doesn't put Brave in any position to abuse your trust as a user.
With Brave Ads, consenting users will benefit from local (on your device) machine-learning, which uses it's knowledge of the user to select the best ads to display. The ML operates off of local data, meaning nothing is sent out to third parties, and Brave isn't collecting personal information about you.
If the user consents to seeing ads, they will also collect up to 70% of the ad revenue. Users will finally get paid for their attention; they've had their attention stolen from them for far too long.
As I stated earlier though, all of this is optional. If you choose not to participate in Brave Ads, you still get a solid ad-and-tracker blocker in Brave. And you still get the option to directly support your favorite content creators out of your own pocket.
Brave is the only hope I see for a strictly "privacy-by-default" browser, which is not powered by an ad-based business model. Brendan Eich isn't a dumbell, he knows what is wrong with broswer-based privacy and what needs fixing.
PS: I use Brave on Android and the experience has been better than Chrome.
Honestly I can't see how anything of
this is problematic for anyone
That pretty much means the ads-are-cancer crowd don't like them, and the adblockers-are-theft crowd don't like them either.
[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3284076/web-browsers/b... https://www.wired.com/2016/04/brave-software-publishers-resp...
Without knowing the implementation details it looks like Brave is (1) removing all the competition, (2) except the ones that play nice, (3) force content creators to buy into their system.
I think it's good that they are trying to find a solution for content creators to monetize their content. Instead on making suppositions on the OP, why not address those points? Why is using Brave not like building the tracking even further into the browser?
Of course Brave is removing the competition within their own product, that's how it usually works in a free market.
Btw, I'm guessing you are a Brave employee, that many Buzzwords in one comment would otherwise be quite astonishing, how does Brave guarantee a users privacy? I assume brave "phones home" in order to replace ads with ads Brave gets compensated for.
Also, I read a lot about a transparent way funds are distributed among publishers, where is the code?
I just see the potential, and want Brave to succeed.
> "What happens to the small sites that don't track users, but display some ads to keep the servers running? Hope that they get "rewarded with BAT's accordingly to the users attention" ?"
What happens to them nowadays, now that most users block ads? They struggle, and they will continue struggling. Brave won't change any of that.
PS: I guess I should ask Brave to hire me for PR
The brilliance of creating a utility token like BAT is so that the creator (Brave) can get rich off speculation, and a horde of people will defend the creator online because they have a couple bucks invested.
It's one of the most insufferable parts of anything to do with cryptocurrency and it's why it's hard to have honest discussion.
I certainly don't think it's necessary nor useful to try and label you as a shill. It's just that BAT is one of the reasons why it's hard to take Brave seriously, and it's why you shouldn't be so dismissive of people who raise issues with Brave much less call them shills of ad-tech or rival browsers (as you did).
Unlike patreon (or Google contributor), if the page doesn't sign up, brave still replaces the ads, but they end up keeping the money.
In those cases, their business model is much closer to a Comcast than an uBlock, and it certainly appears like strong arming creators/sites into joining, or forcing them to forgo revenue and donate it to the browser. If you can't see why that would be upsetting to content creators, idk.
I think there are some subtle, but important, differences though.
Brave users by default block all ads. So those users won't see the ads on content creators sites anyway. Content creators shouldn't feel outraged towards those more than they can feel outraged about any other ad-blocking users.
Some of those Brave users might opt-in for ads that are promised not to compromise their privacy.
So I totally understand that some creators might feel strong-armed if they already use ads. But they shouldn't feel any worse than when faced with ad-blocking users. They do have the chance to opt-in and rely on privacy-respecting ads and get some revenue that they otherwise wouldn't get.
I guess if there was an alternative ad model that was less intrusive, and content creators relied on it, they might have a much stronger reason to be upset. I'm not aware of many creators that use privacy-friendly ads, and it seems like Brave is at least attempting to create this model?
No affiliation with Brave whatsoever. Only found out about it a couple of weeks ago.
See this comment and the surrounding chain.
Assuming I'm a creator, the ussue is that brave is monetizing my content and I get nothing unless I opt in to brave, instead of the system that I already have set up to monetize myself.
Ad blockers don't make money by replacing the ads. Brave does. That's why it's more similar to an isp hijacking ads than ad blocking, it's just happening in the browser instead of in the network.
Users now have the choice to make money from opting-in to ads. But only ads that protect their privacy. Brave enables this, and takes a smaller cut than the user.
Sites choosing to monetize themselves are doing so at the expense of the user, whose privacy is compromised in the process.
I don't think Brave or the User is hijacking things here more than you can say that monetizing sites are hijacking user privacy.
Monetizing sites don't give the user the option to pay for content via other means, or ads that protect their privacy (or even the awareness of what transaction takes place). At least Brave and its users are giving sites the option to get revenue here (revenue that otherwise would be lost if users opt for ad-blocking instead).
N.B. Looking at [0], Brendan Eich stated that "We don't replace ads on publisher sites without that publisher as partner; they get 70% of the gross revenue, user gets 15%.".
Correct. I don't disagree at all with this statement. In the context of just blocking ads, Brave is doing approximately the same thing as any number of other browsers or ad blockers which aren't really objectionable.
>Sites choosing to monetize themselves are doing so at the expense of the user, whose privacy is compromised in the process.
Sure, ok.
>Sites choosing to monetize themselves are doing so at the expense of the user, whose privacy is compromised in the process.
If as Eich claims, they have permission from all publishers, than this is more ok. But if not, the difference is that in one case, the reader, the ad company, and the publisher all get something of value (an article, money & data, money respectively). But if Brave is actually replacing ads without publisher consent, then the user and brave get something of value, and the publisher gets nothing.
>Monetizing sites don't give the user the option to pay for content via other means, or ads that protect their privacy (or even the awareness of what transaction takes place). At least Brave and its users are giving sites the option to get revenue here (revenue that otherwise would be lost if users opt for ad-blocking instead).
Depends, Brave actually explored an option to monetize in a patreon like fashion [0]. Which sounds great, but there's a huge caveat that makes me less inclined to believe Eich elsewhere. Specifically, The "Payments" tool allows any user to donate to any creator or site. Then Brave sends an email to the webmaster address for that internet site (which often doesn't match the publisher: think subdomains). Then, if people continue donating and the site owner never registers, brave will eventually just keep any money donated to the site[1].
In other words, if I run a popular hosted blog (yes these exist, and are probably some of the best candidates for patreon-like funding), I can't actually get verified because I don't control the DNS records for my site, and I will have to sit back and watch as people unknowingly donate money to Brave instead of me.
They then market this as
>Brave even lets you contribute to your favorite creators automatically
So color me suspicious.
> is not driven by ads
Pretty dishonest to say "not driven by ads."
Note how we take a much smaller (Patreon sized) 5% off the anonized contribution flow, so if we had enough ad-averse users contributing, we'd be ok just on that basis. It's not all about ads, but no one can count out ads right now -- $100B gross spend in US this year on digital advertising!
Layer 1: Blocking everything that is not helpful for the user (i.e. being a browser that is a user-agent first and foremost), thus doing essentially the same as content-blocking extensions or other content-blocking browsers (Opera mini, UC)
In this way, there is nothing to be outraged about, since this is a reaction to a complete lack of respect for human dignity and the state of the web on the side of the publishers. The only thing that is parasitic are the ad-networks that pray on vulnerable people. It is easy to overlook that for years browsers have ignored the user so that many gullible people nowadays think that this is how things are supposed to be, but just like ad-tech, users can lobby against the state of things with chosing their software.
Layer 2: Allowing privacy-friendly ads, as opt-in, to help publishers get money and get free from the parasitic ad-networks at the same time
Layer 3: A future-proof patreon like payment network to help publishers survive the ad-backlash, and connect readers and publishers on a new, voluntary, respectful level while also being privacy-friendly.
Honestly I can't see how anything of this is problematic for anyone, except for Brave's rivals (Google, Facebook, Criteo, etc.)
Brave proposes cutting out a bunch of middlemen through the token market and making the browser something like an anticheat system: opt in and it does its best to serve quality ads while preventing click fraud.
There are a lot of details in the execution that matter to make this competitive, but the basic idea resolves many of the current conflicts of interest that make adtech a miserable market.
I always have to remind myself how poisoned the well of tech commentary has become with behemoths like FB, GOOG, AMZN.
Brave blocks third-party ads and trackers (which are not only harmful to users, but often make up more than 50% of all data loaded).
Brave is testing an optional digital advertising model which operates via local (on the user's device) machine-learning to match ads. If a user opts into this component, they will earn up to 70% of the ad revenue.
In the future we will offer publishers (websites) the ability to partner, permitting Brave to display ads on their pages. In this arrangement, publishers will receive 70% of the ad-revenue (far better deal than what most see today), and users will receive 15% for their attention.
In either model, the user must first consent to see ads.
Sampson Developer Brave Software
I'm not sure how that post is misleading. And your responses are either evasive or does not contradict what is originally being claimed.
>Brave blocks third-party ads and trackers (which are not only harmful to users, but often make up more than 50% of all data loaded).
Considering "replacing" ads involve removing the original ones, I'm not sure how this this disproves mswift42's post
>Brave is testing an optional digital advertising model which operates via local (on the user's device) machine-learning to match ads. If a user opts into this component, they will earn up to 70% of the ad revenue.
>In the future we will offer publishers (websites) the ability to partner, permitting Brave to display ads on their pages. In this arrangement, publishers will receive 70% of the ad-revenue (far better deal than what most see today), and users will receive 15% for their attention.
There's still 30% and 15% left, respectively in those examples. Is brave taking any % of that? if so, they're making money off of replaced ads.
>In either model, the user must first consent to see ads.
I fail to see how consent is relevant to a post about what Brave's business model is, especially one that's making a statement without any moral judgement.
However, I think a fundamental issue arises if you are going to pay people to see ads: What if someone forks Brave, and creates a browser which blocks all Brave ads, while pretending to click on them?
Neither of the two solutions I can think of are pleasant ones: you either need to somehow verify that that ads are viewed by a human (i.e. CAPTCHAs), or use DRM-like mechanisms to hide a token in Brave’s brinary, so that only “honest” browsers can get paid.
What Brave offers that's far better than today's joke of an antifraud system for ads is as follows: 1/ integrity-checked open source native code, which cannot be fooled by other JS on page; 2/ looking at all the sensors, even the ones without web APIs, to check humanity.
(1) requires SGX or ARM equivalent, widespread on mobile. JS by contrast cannot be sure of anything unless the antifraud script knows it runs first, and publishers cannot guarantee this in general or easily.
(2) is a material advantage over JS, which has only some but not all sensor APIs.
For more on the joke of antifraud adtech today, please see https://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/state-of-digital-ad-... and https://twitter.com/acfou's other work.
EDIT: Tried just now. Pinch-to-zoom works fine on HN.
(Incidentally, Apple invented (https://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zo...) and tried to patent this gesture: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2045461/us-patent-office-rej... )
My point was individual web pages can’t disable pinch to zoom.
I liked focus and the DDG browser but settled on brave as the best for fit for me.
I don't love any of them but brave works best for the limited way I use my phone. I do check in on the DDG and focus browsers every 3 months or so to see if I want to switch.
Firefox offers various privacy features (check about:config), but they're opt-in and typically have a bar to entry for users to be willing to change settings and know what they will do.
Mozilla might claim to care about privacy, but by not clamping down on third party content and referers, it left most of its userbase in the position of having their privacy invaded by default when using their product. If you care about privacy you fix that, they didn't.
much smoother scrolling
Why is this required?
I can see you're getting a lot of negative feedback here, so as a hopefully countervailing force: this was the thread that finally got me to try Brave on my iPad, iPhone, and mac. I like it so far!
I never thought I'd use any ad blockers, purely on moral grounds. But so many sites have gotten completely unusable in the last year or so: half a dozen auto-playing videos, some of which follow you around the page, text that won't stop flying around the screen long enough for you to read it, etc. It's starting to seem like there is no other choice. If I used it for nothing else, Brave is a whole lot better than Safari on iOS for blocking unnecessary crap.
You really shouldn't get into it with trolls, though. You've had quite a few comments in the last day or so that ended up flagged dead. Not a good look for a CEO.
Questions are never negative and all good if not loaded/trick. Anti-ads or anti-token politics, not so much -- but part of the package deal. The ohmygodel comments were quite good and I'm grateful for them - hope to connect by email.
Thanks for trying Brave!
I think it works like this: (1) Brave Browser submits its transactions to a Brave server to exchange a BAT for an Anonize ballot (anonize.org), (2) each ballot has the name of a site you visited randomly added by the browser with probability proportional to the frequency of site visits, and (3) the ballots are sent to a Brave server. Key here is that the token and ballot submissions are sent directly (e.g. not through a proxy or Tor). In addition, I believe the ballots may be submitted as a batch (i.e. at one point in time). Therefore, it is easy for Brave to see your votes for your visited websites, all coming at once, all from your IP address. That IP address may well be the same one used to exchange the BAT for ballots as well.
There are additional problems regarding visits to unusual and identifying websites that I feel like Brave hasn't begun to consider, either. Suppose that every and only time that Brave receives a ballot for your personal website, they also receive a ballot for some unpopular and sensitive website. They can then conclude that the owner of the website also visits that sensitive site.
These problems must be addressed before Brave can be considered seriously by privacy-conscious users.
We use ANONIZE2 based on https://anonize.org/ to blind ourselves to your history. Can’t be evil > Don’t be evil. We see only zero-knowledge proofs that say how many votes go to sites or YouTube or Twitch accounts. These proofs do not link to user id or to ine another (so no fingerprint by clustering). They go over an IP address masking service to our accounting server, while your monthly budget goes in a single token transaction.
Note Google and other ad tech powers do track your history. Logging into Chrome even gives your history over for ad targeting. Blendle, Flattrplus, other such services also see your history. But we do not.
For IP masking in the case where you buy your own tokens, we have two options: 1/ relaying at IP level where we would not see your IP address and the partner would not see any encrypted payloads; 2/ Tor, which is already integrated. More to do but you led with “we see user history” and that is just false in all these cases. We do not see history of sites visited or supported on a linkable to user basis.
Suppose I understand you correctly and you do see the network IPs and timestamps of submitted tokens and ballots. Is your argument then that you can be trusted to follow your privacy policy? If we rely on trusting you to follow policy, then why not get rid of your zero knowledge proofs entirely?
By saying that you "have two options", it sounds like you are saying that there are two mitigations for the privacy problem that you could use but do not yet.
(1) is the one-hop proxy, which used to be used in the form of Private Internet Access service, but it seems like it is not currently being used by Brave. If you did use such a service and encrypted the publisher identities under Brave's public key, then that would be a improvement, although still not really private because Brave would receive the results in a batch from Private Internet Access. Browsing histories are essentially fingerprints for each user. The ten sites I visit each week are almost certainly not shared by any other Brave user on the planet, and moreover they are frequently identifiable (consider sites for individuals, companies, sports leagues, scohols, etc.). From [0]: "Our results show that for a majority of users (69 %), the browsing history is unique and that users for whom we could detect at least four visited websites were uniquely identified by their histories in 97 % of cases."
(2) has the same batching problem as (1). It would be superior, though, because it would be harder for Brave and the proxy system to collude or (more likely) be forced to cooperate with some authority.
To handle the batching problem, you should at least choose to upload each Anonize ballot at a uniformly random time in each month and on a separate connection (i.e. TCP connection or Tor circuit). You should also explain how this works in a technical document to give people the ability to understand what exactly they are signing up for when they enable payments in Brave. Ideally you would use a cryptographic protocol more suited to strong anonymity than a proxy network, such as a verifiable mix network or a secure-multiparty-computation protocol.
[0] Olejnik et al., "On the uniqueness of Web browsing history patterns", 2014, <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12243-013-0392-5>
As we are all open source and will get annual audits when scaled beyond trials, I think you are mistrusting prematurely.
On linkability for users who buy their own BAT and so do not require the antifraud terms: as noted in my item 1, we are talking to PIA about using an IP relay (not full VPN). This got delayed by their work on handshake.org but we're restarting it.
Tor (item 2) is better and batching is not an issue. We do not make cross-site/channel linkable batches in any event. Each ANONIZE session paying a given domain or YouTube/Twitch account is separate from every other. Putting these through separate Tor circuits is possible, as we also randomly space them out in time.
I don't know why you are telling us to do things we already do. Did you find a bug in the open source? We pay bounties.
So the ultimate goal is to get away from ANONIZEd traffic to a blind accounting server. But as I say, lots of problems to solve before promising this. Yet with Ethereum scaling and anonymity support, for users who buy their own BAT (where I claim your objection to IP address has most merit), we could go p2p on-chain for decentralization w/o fraud risk for bring-your-own-BAT users.
Even using a privacy-enhanced blockchain isn't necessarily sufficient. Blockchains do not provide anonymous messaging. Therefore, a recipient R of a transaction can identify the sender S if R can observe S sending the transaction. Yes, this problem affects Bolt, Zcash, Monero, etc.
In case it's not clear, I'm earnestly asking this question
I am reasonably familiar with the contents of GDPR, having looked into it more after attending a lecture on the subject [0].
> We cannot use IP address except for antifraud, so it is not legally viable for us to try to link zero-knowledge proofs into a profile based on IP address.
If your users must rely on you obeying a policy, then please just say that. Right now, it seems to me that you claim to use technical means to prevent Brave from learning browsing histories [1].
> my home AT&T IP address wanders often, so do many others; mobile even more variable.
IP addresses can be so identifying that they have been ruled as personally-identifiable information by the European Court of Justice [2].
> I think you are mistrusting prematurely. But as noted in my item 1, we are talking to PIA about using an IP relay (not full VPN). This got delayed by their work on handshake.org but we're restarting it.
Thank you for stating clearly that you aren't using PIA (aka "IP masking") at the moment for Brave Payments. You might consider your users who are worried about data breaches and compromised servers as much as they are worried about Brave's intentions. Please don't take my criticisms personally.
> Putting these through separate Tor circuits is possible, as we also randomly space them out in time.
Oh, you do randomly delay ballot submissions? I have not been able to find any such logic in the code but would be happy to be pointed to it. The specific way in which you choose delays is, of course, crucial to it providing security.
[0] <https://petsymposium.org/2018/program.php>
[1] <https://brave.com/faq-payments/#anonymous-contributions>
[2] <https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/european-cour....
I did just say that, several times -- but with conditions that do not make it a matter of "policy" only. We agree IP address should be masked for self-funded users. Working on it!
We are very familiar with how any user log can be used as a history, but anonized proofs that can't link to a user id except illegally to IP address are not on the same level of threat as the Blendle, Flattrplus, etc. histories taken in the clear -- never mind Google et al. surveillance. To equate the tech and not make any distinctions does a disservice to us in my view. I'm not sure you did equate, but see next paragraph.
Tech alone is never enough for anything like what we are doing. Addresses matter, if not IP then on blockchain. There are side channels. There will be bugs. IMHO you have to include the social and legal constraints, too. Even a p2p with ZKP solution has some risk due to the blockchain addresses, which need purpose-limited terms under GDPR too.
On road, will get you links to code for randomizing time between ANONIZE sessions as soon as I can.
You'd be surprised how far you can get. For example, protocol design exist that provide strong message anonymity: mixnets, DC-nets, and secure multiparty computation (MPC). Tor is great at its goals, but it accepts weaker security for low latency that Brave doesn't need. Tor is also unfortunately blocked in many companies and countries by technology and/or policy. Mixnets are freely available [0]. MPC is sold commercially [1]. (I have no personal or professional connection to either project.)
> On road, will get you links to code for randomizing time between ANONIZE sessions as soon as I can.
Looking forward to it.
Many thanks for the serious engagement. I look forward to recommending Brave to my friends and colleagues in the not-distant future!
[0] <https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org> [1] <https://www.unboundtech.com/>
Also we like macro-auditability from funding wallet to omnibus settlement, to show we took the %ages we promised.
JS implementation in Muon-based https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop product:
1. https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-client/blob/master/index.j...
2. https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-client/blob/master/index.j...
3. https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-client/blob/master/index.j...
From Marshall Rose: "the first deals with the delay in before asking for ballots (after a contribution) and the second deals with each delay between submitting each ballot."
New "brave-core" (chromium refork to get front end but w/o Google accounts/sync), the new implementation; narration by Serg Zhukovsky:
"""
here we make a first call https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
which calls that function https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
after the random wait it calls that function https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci...
and in it’s callback it goes all over again if there are still votes to send
if you are interested in the function that does the randomization, it’s here: https://github.com/brave-intl/bat-native-ledger/blob/reconci... """
The C++ is all new code, not yet released -- bug reports welcome! Thanks.
I see that the delay from one ballot batch to the next is set to a uniformly-random time between 10 and 60 seconds. I also see that the ballot batch size is 10.
Let's assume that you have fixed the problem of the ballots being submitted in the clear and that they are instead send through a proxy on different TCP connections (or through Tor on different circuits). Let's also say that the news reports are correct and Brave has 4 million active users, and moreover that all have enabled payments (this is generous). Furthermore, assume that (1) there is no reason payments would start being submitted on any particular day or time, and (2) say, 20 publishers are paid 20 tokens each on average. Then the average number of users uploading ballots in any given minute - let's call them "neighbors" - is roughly (20 ballots/user / 10 ballots/batch)(20 publishers/month)(4e6 users)/(30 days/month)/(24 hours/day)/(60 minute/hour) = 3704 neighbors. That's not a very big anonymity set, but it's not nothing. Early adopters got screwed, though.
However, it gets worse. Based on BatClient::prepareVoteBatch() (bat_client.cc), it looks like each batch has ballots for a single publisher (if I'm wrong, privacy erodes even further). How many of those 3704 simultaneous uses are uploading to the exact same domain? I don't know how to guess (to be conservative, we should assume none). Moreover, unless the last batch happens to be a multiple of 10, that one will be unique in being a size less than 10. Both of these things make it easy in many cases to determine when you are finished uploading ballots for one publisher and are moving onto the next. If many of your neighbors have split a publisher's votes across multiple batches, then it seems unlikely that they will move to the next publisher at the same time, making your ballot submissions more linkable across publishers, exactly the problem we were worried about.
In addition, the time of each batch isn't independent because the delay is applied after the last one. For example, if one batch appears is sent quickly by chance, then the next one is more likely to be sent at a time close to the initial batch. Thus, to link two batches, you only need to consider the batches that end in the 10-60 seconds preceding the start of the second one. How many of your 3704 neighbors ended a batch then? The longer a batch upload takes, (due to latency & bandwidth), the less likely that the batch of any other user has ended in that short time frame.
There is also the issue of semantic linking. If I'm a relatively rare group, the sites I visit are likely to be linkable to each other as distinct from those of my neighbors. For example, suppose I speak Catalán and am involved in regional politics, or that I am a teenage boy in Iceland. How many of my sites are linkable based on those characteristics? And this linking can happen across "gaps" in the ballot-upload stream, where there is uncertainly about how the uploads are linked together, allowing you to get the inference "back on track".
Fortunately, the timing stuff seems fixable. Hiding the IP and separating ballots across connections is an essential first step, of course. but to handle timing issues after that, simply do the following: (1) submit all ballots individually; (2) schedule each ballot upload independently of the other ballots and at a uniformly-random time over, say, the next week or two, and if the user isn't online, reschedule.
The semantic issues with small populations seems harder. I think Brave should prevent itself from learning about votes for publishers unless enough people vote for the publisher. I don't see how to do this without a more powerful cryptographic protocol (it is absolutely doable, though, using MPC for example).
We will work on improving the system. Please mail me first at brave dot com if you want to correspond further. Thanks again.
Otherwise, I could say links is a superior browser because it loads pages even faster than Brave.
BTW, the rampant inefficiency and bugginess of ads is what prompted me to install first AdBlock and then Brave in the first place. I have no problem with viewing ads or supporting content publishers; I do have a problem when the sheer weight of all the ads and trackers they include on their page means I'm waiting 10+ seconds for the page to load and there's a good chance of it locking up entirely. If the damn ad networks would just follow best practices regarding efficient & robust JS serving I wouldn't block them, but they don't, so I do.
See https://medium.com/@robleathern/carriers-are-making-more-fro... and https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost... for more information.
How is this appealing?
The privacy things also really disturbs me.
I don't mind seeing an ad and you getting paid for it when I read the latest changes to the HPV guidance from the FDA for example, but I don't want multiple evil places like "addthis" "add-to-'any" and the likes to be creating some kind of profile and selling it.
The newspaper ads did not tell others that I read the "whatever article" in the paper.
I also can not stand moving ads. SO many really good articles are ruined by animated gifs/mp4s jumping for attention. It saddens me, and likely the authors of really good long form articles, I think from the Atlantic and NYTImes recently I was taken out of the feeling and captivating moments of articles to look at the moving distractions next to them many times.
This not only made articles take twice as long to read, but made them much less impactful, and harder to remember.
These are some of the reasons I posted a while back (http://www.ideasandwritings.com/2016/adblock-into-fairblock/ ) the desire to have an ad-blocker with some 2 way communication so I could have settings that block all third party ads, and moving ads, but would gladly accept static self served ads from sites that had reasonable privacy policies.
I would take it further and offer up some extra data points to those ads the were guaranteed secure so you could make more money and "i could get awesome ads relative to me" - I imagine many others would be happy to offer city, sex, and age for example, if privacy was controlled by "reputable publisher on list here" for example.
For these reasons I seriously applaud this project. It's not perfect, but it seems to be the closest to what I wrote about some time ago - and I think it's a huge jump in the right direction.
I applaud all the attempts, ad blockers, micro payments, different models for payments and attention - lets try everything and find what works for different people.
So glad to see publishers jumping on board to get some ad revenue from those who would choose to block privacy stealing, possible malware sending ads. Now if we can fine tune it a bit more I'd love to see some back and forth discussion between my browser and the ad server. (no alcohol ads, yes to tech, static only please, male, etc)
Heck I might actually click and buy to support more if the ads get better, not just more attention stealing which seems to be the race to the outrageous that clickbait and such is going.
Maybe this will start to force some changes.
I’m not familiar with Vivaldi, but DDG has a different business model because it’s self imposed limitations on user data that has privacy sensitivity.
And Brave is quite different as it eschews ads altogether and rather uses its Basic Attention Token for users to directly find sites and take a cut [0]. This method requires no user data and is really different that Chrome that requires extensive user personal data to maintain its desired profit margins.
* DDG is a search engine that doesn't track its users. It kinda sorta emulates Google's look-and-feel, but so does Bing and Wolfram Alpha and search.yahoo.com and everyone else.
* Vivaldi is yet another Chromium-based browser, for the microscopic niche of Opera fans who feel that Opera "went mainstream". If it's parasitic to base a browser on Chromium, then Chrome itself is a parasite for forking off KDE's WebKit.
Are you arguing that using privacy concerns as a marketing tool, to compete for a slice of Google's monopoly, makes one a "parasite"? Because not only is that a poor argument in the abstract, it doesn't even apply as Vivaldi doesn't really promote itself on privacy grounds.
I think that they will tend to behave better as small companies. Most large companies started off as small companies doing good things. But you should probably accept that if they become dominant players, you will have to jump ship again at some point.
I don't know about "paranoia". Google, Facebook, etc. can gather a lot of information and perform very sophisticated analysis on it, and aside from what we know they do with it, they can accidentally leak it, get compromised, or just flat-out get more evil in what they can and will do with it as time goes on.
oh, and it removes site ads and inserts it’s own. then it holds the forums hostage to get into its own ads model.
To your second part, I won't be doing any of that ad replacement (consent or not, just like I don't with my Chromium-based browser with native ad blocking).
They've since moved from Muon to Chromium for the browser chrome[3].
[1]: https://github.com/brave/muon/blob/master/README.md [2]: https://github.com/brave/muon/blob/master/docs/tutorial/movi...
[3]: https://brave.com/development-plans-for-upcoming-release/
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Brave.com&sort=byDate&dateRang...
Wasn't intentional at all.
If the page author writes <body id="ads"> ... , normal browsers will show you the content of the <body>, while Brave will show you nothing (in 0.001 seconds) :D
Personally, I think that using browsers, which add / remove / rewrite (i.e. censor) the web content for you, is quite dangerous. If it rewrites the Google Search results once in a while, or rewrites some part of the news, you would not even notice.