Brave Introduces Brave Today, the Privacy-Preserving News Reader
brave.com
brave.com
What "algorithm" you ask?
> We’re using Brave’s new private CDN to fetch RSS feeds anonymously via the browser and the browser’s personalization capabilities to rank the headlines for users with a simple algorithm that will make the experience interesting for everyone.
This seems like spying... with extra steps. In the meantime, Vivaldi added good old, classic RSS reader (and email client). To their experiments[1] (not affiliated).
Brave might be great, but it feels like Crypto AG[2] spinoff.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-mail-technical-preview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
Affiliate marketing is means to generate revenue and a better than taking massive payouts from Google, which is the primary funding source for Mozilla Firefox.
As a privacy conscious user I’d rather see a browser that be sustained without Google’s support. Given the co-creator of Mozilla (and .JS) is behind Brave, I trust it more than the fly by night browser.
Pocket now shows recommendations base on popular saves, but a proper news aggregator for daily news could serve Mozilla and its customers well considering Pocket is tightly integrated within Firefox.
A banner of Firefox currently shows that 703 million links were saved on Pocket this year alone.
If you really want to avoid being tracked, you probably want a more robust solution than simply choosing the browser vendor that's least honest about its monetisation strategy, and you're particularly unlikely to want to be getting browser history based feed recommendations from your browser vendor's CDN anyway
I think you're confusing BAT with the affiliate links which are two distinct things Brave has done. BAT I agree with you on there is still tracking there or otherwise they wouldn't be able to attribute the money to you. Affiliate links though do not have the same connotation and is the subject under discussion in this comment chain.
And the actual discussion subject I raised isn't the horrors of affiliate links and affiliates accessing metadata on trends in their user base's access to certain third party websites so much as Brave's history of "mistakes". The BAT might require considerably more storage of personal data, but at least its existence isn't a secret
It’s no different than the terrible browser addons that claim they’re helping you find coupon, while stuffing affiliate cookies into your session to generate commission (and also selling your data)
Consider that LTT shows a spreadsheet of all the Amazon items bought of a specific item in their video "I can SEE what you Bought Online", and it includes the quantity, price, and date in which it was bought:
TRACKING
Brave doesn't track users. I invite anybody reading to take a look at their network activity; in fact, I'll sit down and give anybody an introductory walk-through of Telerik Fiddler and show them how to inspect their own network activity, to observe in plain-text what Brave is doing, and with whom it is communicating. I do this regularly, and share results [1]. You don't have to take my word on it either; unaffiliated third-parties have published similar results [2].
[1] https://brave.com/brave-tops-browser-first-run-network-traff... [2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-deemed-most-private-brow...
AFFILIATE LINKS
Brave has never "inserted affiliate links onto website". This is quite misleading. What Brave did do was offer users who were performing a search from the address bar of the browser a list of suggested results. Among those results, Brave would at times show an affiliate option.
We wrote about this on our blog (and included screenshots) for those interested [3]. Note, no data was involved. No network requests were made. There was no impact to privacy in any way, shape, or form. This was simply a suggestion offered in a drop-down beneath the address bar.
Affiliate links are a clean way for browsers (or any app, really) to generate revenue. Open up Firefox, Vivaldi, or Opera and type 'hacker news' into the address bar. In Firefox, you'll be redirected to https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hacker+ne... by default. Note the "client=firefox" in the query-string parameter list. In Opera you're sent to https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=hacker+news&sou... by default. Note the "client=opera" and "sourceid=opera" elements.
Brave's mistake was matching a fully-qualified domain name. What we had planned for was showing a set of suggested URLs (some with an affiliate code) when a user searched for something like "binance". We mistakenly showed the same results when the user typed a fully-qualified domain name, like "binance.us" as well. That was unintended, and was corrected within 48 hours of identification.
[3] https://brave.com/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/
SOLICITING DONATIONS
Brave is doing something quite different from other browsers; it aims to not only improve security on the Web, but also to offer novel support options to content creators everywhere in a privacy-respecting, and sustainable manner.
Brave ships with a Tipping interface to empower users to send rewards (in the form of Basic Attention Tokens) to content creators. When we launched this model, Brave gave tokens to its users, and users could give those to the sites they visit. When a user tipped a site, the tokens would go to the Creator (if verified), or into a settlement wallet to be claimed at a later date. Brave would reach out to Creators, informing them of rewards (similar to the early days of PayPal).
There were a couple issues here, which you can read about on our blog [4]. One was a UI issue. Brave marked verified domains with a checkmark (similar to Twitter's 'verified' accounts). We didn't have any special mark for non-verified properties. This was naive on our part. We remedied this by explicitly stating the status of the Creator in both cases.
The second problem was allowing tokens to move out of the user's wallet when the Creator wasn't even verified. Personally, I'm incredibly thankful that this issue was found. Under that model, tons of tokens could be dropped into a wallet, and never claimed by anybody. In the update we produced within a couple days), this model was changed. Now unverified creators wouldn't receive anything; instead, tips issued to an unverified creator would stay on your device, and be retried for up to 90 days. If the Creator verified within that timeframe, they'd collect the tips. If they didn't, the tips could be sent to somebody else.
Brave never solicited tips for anybody. There was simply a component of the browser which enabled users to send tips to sites and creators they appreciated. Brave's main fault here was with naive UI, and a contribution model which could have resulted in lost tokens. Thankfully, our users caught both issues and we were able to improve the feature quickly.
[4] https://brave.com/rewards-update/
I hope this helps.
They don't really have an amazing track record as privacy first company. They do have a proven track record of "trying to monetize users".
I've recently switched to it as my main browser, enjoy using it and have recommended to others who want to opt-out of the Google ecosystem. However, if there are examples of privacy abuse I may revisit.
Vivaldi is a pretty good chromium-based browser, if you want to stay away from Google but still need chromium. I'd still take Firefox any day, though.
Edit: I deleted everything apart from cookies. Vivaldi feels much faster now. I think equally as fast as Brave.
True, and they reversed course after (quite fairly) being called out on it.
But, that incident has nothing to do with privacy.
Firefox: google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=hacker+news
Vivaldi: bing.com/search?FORM=INCOH2&PC=IFJ1&PTAG=ICO-c9d0fc87&q=hacker%20news
Note how both of the browsers you suggested here added affiliate tags onto the URL. In Brave, the user could see the affiliate code before navigating. Not so in the browsers you suggest as "pretty good" and worth taking "any day".
Vivaldi has tons of features, with recent additions maybe even too much for average job. The major flaw is, as you mentioned, it is chromium based.
> Brave Today is supported by two new commercial offerings: Brave Offers and Promoted Content.
They also said:
> A premium ad-free version of Brave Today will be available soon.
IMHO this is a pretty decent balance. Companies have to capture value from their work somehow. Brave's advertising strategy involves software on the local device using data on the local device to make a decision about what to show the user. (Not an ever expanding privacy invasive cloud-profile of the user).
Additionally, if ads are not your thing, you can always pay for the premium version and everyone still wins!
Brave is "Can't be evil," as opposed to "don't be evil." We don't even want the capacity to do wrong.
I still dont understand why RSS isn't part of every browser. In the old days we have problem with syncing. Today most browser bookmark has online backup. You have a bunch of RSS links, that could be saved as Bookmarks / Favourite. The content are simply XML and all inks are synced to all Browsers. You laid them out like in Feedly and that is it.
I could understand email being a lot more difficult, but RSS? Am I missing something?
Can't get much simpler than "chronological", I hope they don't get too fancy with the same black box ordering that's ruined social media for news aggregation.
I've literally turned off all of their crypto/ad/sponsor features and it's starting to get pretty annoying; every time Brave gets a major update I feel like more crap is bundled that I'll have to hunt down and turn off. Their crypto tips feature added tip buttons on various websites (like Twitter). This is not ok. People would be hugely annoyed if Chrome started adding "Tip with Google Pay" under each tweet.
I get that they're a company and need to make money. Their stance on privacy is awesome but I wish there was a better way to do this. I would pay for Brave+ with none of this bundled stuff and all of the privacy features.
Brave Rewards is a nice idea. But I'm not interested at all. So continually trying to put it back in my face means I trust them less as a whole.
Personally, I'm uninstalling as soon as I shrink the open number of tabs down to zero (which does take me some weeks sometimes!).
One big plus for me is it syncs with my phone (where I do vastly prefer Brave to Chrome).
Their work on browser fingerprinting is a good example of a feature only available in Brave, to pick just one. This involved implementing mitigation techniques based on the latest research into the topic, something I haven't seen anyone else do.
Blocking harmful ads and trackers is a necessity; users were already doing it in growing numbers before Brave came along. But this trend, while it yields safer users, cuts into the support given to the sites we visit and love. And asking users to send money to sites isn't necessarily a solid solution either.
So Brave aims to address both issues: 1) User Privacy, and 2) Creator Support. What's interesting about this is that Ads are both the problem and solution. But not in their present form. Presently, ads on the Web harvest user information, auction it off to third-parties, and build up profiles on remote servers, far beyond user control.
Brave's privacy-respecting ad model uses client-side matching against regional catalogs (avoiding fingerprinting) with machine-learning. This model ensures privacy. And when an ad is displayed, 70% of the revenue goes into the user's cryptographically-secured wallet. This is where the second challenge (supporting content creators) comes in. As you browse, the ad-revenue you've generated gets queued up for the sites you visit. The privacy-respecting ads you view are translated into real-world support for the sites you visit.
This is one of the reasons why users prefer Brave. We aren't trying to solve half of the problem; we're trying to reform the Web such that it remains free, equitable, and open.
[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-...
Same about the algorithm (see the link in the article in the top). It's kinda nice knowing what algorithm is controlling what you are seeing.
I’ve never once cared or noticed the crypto stuff. It’s a simple toggle off.
We’ve deployed Brave across our entire enterprise worldwide, mobile and desktop.
There is a negative anti-Brave campaign that comes sweeping through every time Brave is posted on HN.
It blocked most ads and I even made around 2€ in BAT with it. For that I got small text ads as a popup in the bottom right corner.
I switched from Firefox, which I used for a year, because using heavy web apps are my bread and butter.
You're right about how it seems to... generate a certain kind of negative reaction when mentioned. The comments about Brave not respecting privacy because it inserted affiliate links is nonsensical but repeated over and over, which makes it seem that someone is on a crusade against them.
There seems to be a positive one too. Brave’s shortcomings are not completely unfounded.
EDIT: Added “completely”
I doubt this is a complete explanation, but a lot of the nonsensical comments I've seen come from Firefox fans who can't deal with a browser neutralizing one of the most compelling arguments against Chrome (privacy), so they have to pretend that Brave's odd business model (which is totally worthy of criticism!) has flaws that it doesn't, particularly as experienced by the user.
What would those be?
Does this issue cause any administrative pain (inability to whitelist entire domains)?
> The Brave Today news reader ranks stories locally for the user from hundreds of popular RSS feeds using an algorithm that weighs several factors, including the user’s browser history and article published date.
Ideally, though, I would like to see this implemented as a browser extension or something like that that can be added/removed as desired.
Not really interested until then.
Even then, what this really means is that when you "add an RSS feed", it'll be added to Brave's back-end system so they can continue to own the distribution. This demolishes the creator/consumer relationship, which is an incredibly sleazy thing to do to content creators.
Imagine the HN outcry if Chrome worked the same way, and could no longer fetch web pages directly.
I will personally never use a so-called news reader that inserts itself as a centralized middleman between myself and everything I read.
Yes. Brave [EDIT: the company] is unilaterally putting itself between the creator and the consumer, usurping the task of serving the RSS content without the permission of the content owner. Among other problems, this destroys the ability of creators to get even basic readership metrics for people who might choose to use Brave.
Imagine that Brave [EDIT: the browser] started copying and serving your entire web site in your name without your permission, rather than just your RSS. Does that help you understand why this is a problem?
Serving RSS content doesn't require permission; the public feed itself is permission. It's created for the purpose of content syndication (it's in the name). Brave shows only a preview of content (an image, headline, title, date, and maybe a sentence or two from the feed). For the actual content, the user has to go to the resource itself.
As for measuring their Brave user-base, publishers were already in a tough spot. Brave reports itself as "Chrome" to these sites. Ideally, the publisher shouldn't need to know if their users are in Chrome or Brave. This feature (Brave Today) doesn't change this relationship in any way.
Your hypothetical (if Brave starting copying and distributing, verbatim, websites) is definitely terrible. But that isn't even remotely close to what's happening here; Brave Today shows less content than search results on DuckDuckGo, Google, Bing, or beyond.
I've clarified my comments above to disambiguate, thank you.
> Serving RSS content doesn't require permission; the public feed itself is permission.
So does Brave not understand the importance of feed metrics for creators? Or if it does, is the plan is to force creators to get metrics for Brave Today users from Brave?
Regarding feed metrics from Brave, what information would we give over? Brave doesn't know who is reading what; we've made Brave Today in such a way that uses and requests aren't handled by the same entity at the same time. The goal is to have no knowledge, while yielding a personalized experience.
There should be none to give, which is perfectly aligned with your goal to have no knowledge.
Brave [the company] should consider interfering with RSS metrics as verboten has interfering with web page metrics. That means that clients/user-agents should grab feed updates from the original RSS, using ETags and Last-Modified to avoid unnecessary fetches of unchanged feeds. (Caching for temporary unavailability is normal and fine.)
> …I'm not sure I understand why a feed source needs to know if a viewer is accessing the content via Brave or Chrome.
You brought this up, but it isn't a concern I've expressed. Brave Today would ideally have a uniquely identifiable user agent for RSS metrics, but I don't know that it's necessary.
(That's all I have to say about this. Thanks for listening.)
Sorry, I thought that's what you meant by "this destroys the ability of creators to get even basic readership metrics for people who might choose to use Brave" earlier.
> Brave Today would ideally have a uniquely identifiable user agent for RSS metrics, but I don't know that it's necessary.
That's definitely something I could see a publisher requesting in the future; we've done something similar with custom headers in requests, standing in for a unique user-agent string.
This is not only a lie, it's a particularly egregious one. And very easy to verify.
Original tweet (2:36 AM Pacific, June 6 2020) https://twitter.com/cryptonator1337/status/12692014801055784...
Response from Brave (10:00 AM Pacific, same day) https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269313200127795201
It took them all of one whole business hour to respond. One hour. That's absolutely unheard of.
The above just goes to show how eager some people are to spread FUD in a blatantly dishonest and malicious way about certain things they oppose. It blows my mind.
I use Brave Rewards (as a website owner) and never had any issues. I receive BAT, convert it to my local currency, and then transfer it to my bank account. That's money I would never receive because it comes from users that block ads.
Okay boomer... Seriously people, ease up on the hyperbole and approach this with a little perspective. Sure, Brendan Eich != Mother Theresa, but its not like he is claiming to be! He is just another bloke with some good ideas and some not so good ideas, trying to be successful (and honestly doing a pretty good job of it).
Sure, Brave has made some mistakes along the way and it is right to call them out on it. Stuff like secret affiliate links is not great from a transparency perspective, but it is also not really hostile or harmful to Brave users. Plus, let the record show that corrective action was taking when Brave was called out.
I am not saying we should all "trust" Brave any more that other companies (do your research and come to your own conclusions), but lets not pretend that the folks at Google or anywhere else are really any more trustworthy.
(Lastly, I am sorry if cryptocurrency makes you uncomfortable, but that does not change the fact that it is a really effective way to provide a low-friction method of exchanging value (e.g. micro-transactions). IDK if the BAT is the future of ad-tech, but I applaud them for trying to find new methods of monetization that don't involve directly harming users and their privacy...)
I've been using Brave for about a year now and am really happy with it. I love paying creators directly and just wish more creators would sign up for the rewards.
ps. I know, I know. Brave's ads are unobtrusive, they don't track you, they donate crypto to the sites, etc. etc. It doesn't change the underlying emotional response a lot of people seem to have to their business model.
Brave doesn't do this so that's a plus.
Accusations of stealing are pretty foul. Please can we keep the discussion focused on the facts?
The blocking of ads and trackers has been taking place for years; long before Brave came along (in it was happening when Netscape released the NPAPI back in the mid-90s).
Content Creators and Publishers, who make the Web enjoyable for us, rely on third-party advertising models which engage in data-harvesting and attention-auctioning without explicit user consent.
Brave helps protect users from harmful ads and trackers (which not only harvest data, but deliver malicious bits in return), while offering a model whereby users can anonymously support publishers by way of privacy-respecting ads.
Brave Ads are matched on-device, using local access to data. When you view an ad, 70% of the associated revenue is sent to your cryptographically-secured wallet. As you browse the Web, verified content creators can receive support (either actively or passively) from those rewards.
Users are safe. Creators are supported. That's Brave.
That's a pretty low bar. Mother Teresa's no Mother Teresa.
Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed? (psyche.co)
Affiliate links aren't uncommon; definitely not worth trying to keep a secret. Open Firefox (or Opera, Vivaldi, etc.) and do a search for "hacker news" from the address bar. Every one of these browsers adds its identifier to the resulting query. By contrast, Brave offered a search suggestion with a [visible] affiliate code attached.
Wasn't this related to YouTube channels? I remember Tom Scott complaining about it on Twitter.
While the browser probably shouldn't ask users if they want to donate to people that haven't joined Brave Rewards, the money is returned to the sender (up to 3 months later, I believe) if the creator doesn't join Brave Rewards. It's not like they stole donations.
> they have secretely added affiliate links
They did that with some crypto sites when typing the keyword/URL in the search bar. I can't defend the decision, but the code is on Github[0] and they admitted doing it as soon people pointed it out. And then reverted the change.
I'm not sure what to think about this monetisation strategy. What's the downside for users? Is it worse than generating revenue by selling the default search engine to the highest bidder? And why is it wrong for browsers to do it but it's fine when some search engines do it?
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0. https://github.com/brave/brave-core/blob/1cac2377c9a2d5e3587...
Are you sure you're not experiencing placebo effect and/or confirmation bias? Brave and Chrome use the same underlying rendering engine, so the performance and memory usage should be the same.
[1] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost...
We need to put the filtering / ranking function back into our hands. We need a browser that can learn our preferences and enforce them, while protecting our privacy as well. Ad block lists are a start, but they only filter ads and don't re-rank the feeds.
Permanently block Quora and Pinterest from any results
Choose how to sort my results. Why doesn’t google have that?
Have the option to prioritise forum pages
Have a clear choice between getting generic results and personal algorithm results
You need the filtering processing to be local and visible but you can't win the fight by avoiding all filtering.
IMO what makes sense is manually curated sources for your knowledge area and the rest machine-picked for you to read and retain a general knowledge of the world.
Then you can just use an RSS reader like Flym which works just fine and access the websites that you want when you want it with a mobile browser.
Bravo brave!
That said, if this broke the layout on Reddit, we definitely consider that a bug and would like to fix it. If you don't mind sharing, are you using any extensions which augment Reddit in any way (e.g. Reddit Enhancement Suite)?
As a screen reader user, I want a newsreader that does the exact opposite, actually. Nothing but article contents should be let through, no "related stories", no GDPR pop ups, and no "we don't seve European users here" error pages. I would be happy if I could force my browser to display everything as AMP, whenever there was an AMP version available. Kind of like the default reader view in Safari.