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I feel the author is on point. Brave is all about marketing and surfing the privacy wave to make profit. Take a look at https://brave.com/brave-ads/ https://br

I feel the author is on point. Brave is all about marketing and surfing the privacy wave to make profit. Take a look at https://brave.com/brave-ads/ https://brave.com/brave-ads/ Brave goal is to acquire as much users as possible to sell them to advertisers. They are no different from Google. Might as well use Chrome with ublock origin and farm crypto on your own.

psiops 5y ago
The difference is that with Brave you are rewarded for your attention to these ads. That idea has some merit I think, regardless of how it's implemented in Brave.
celsoazevedo 5y ago
The privacy/tracking aspect of Braves Ads (which you don't have to use) seems to be way, way better than Google Adsense. It's like comparing the good ol' fixed "image banner + link" vs Adsense. They're both ads, but one is better than the other. And then you have Chrome sending data directly to Google, the auto logins, dark patterns, etc, which you don't get with Brave or Vivaldi.
- judge2020 5y ago
  I find it funny that people say this when this is pretty much exactly what FLOC is - the browser choosing your interests and deciding which interests to send to the ad server - but without the "show ads on every website and hold the profits from website owners until they claim it".
  - celsoazevedo 5y ago
    > deciding which interests to send to the ad server I was looking at their media kit[0]. They link to a presentation[1] which mentions that the ads are sent to the browser and then the browser itself picks the ones that should be shown to the user. If this is really the case, then the browser isn't sending that information to the ad server. [0] https://brave.com/brave-ads/assets/Brave_Media_Kit.pdf https://brave.com/brave-ads/assets/Brave_Media_Kit.pdf [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEj5ZiQohJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEj5ZiQohJc
    - judge2020 5y ago
      This wouldn’t work for an ad network as big as Google’s, and would further centralize who can serve ads to users (something Google can’t get away with like Brave can).
      - celsoazevedo 5y ago
        > This wouldn’t work for an ad network as big as Google’s Yeah, maybe. I was just pointing out that it doesn't send the user's preferences to a server.
- varnaud 5y ago
  >The privacy/tracking aspect of Braves Ads (which you don't have to use) seems to be way, way better than Google Adsense Exactly, "seems". Once again, good marketing from the Brave team. Heck, they even sponsored chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura on his Twitch stream.
  - marvindanig 5y ago
    The ad industry isn't going away, if you're thinking of a world in the future sans ads. With the Brave's model, at least you are able to make some profit for yourself. It's not utopian, but works from a capitalist's standpoint. And a lot of real users like it!
  - celsoazevedo 5y ago
    Can you target users via Brave Ads like you can with Adwords/Adsense? If I understood correctly (I might be wrong - hence the "seems"), you can't because they're not doing anything close to what Google does. I guess my point is that not all tracking or ads are the same. You can track clicks and views of a banner without profiling users across multiple sites and apps, learn all you can, and then let advertisers target them.
miedpo 5y ago
Well I mean, yes, they want their ads to succeed (that's how they can offer a product for free). I don't think there's anything wrong with that. What matters to me is how much data they collect and how they use it. It seems pretty clear to me that they go out of their way to collect less data, and try to be very privacy concious about it. Do you think they are lying about that? I personally don't, and the code is there for us to audit (the only closed source part of the browser is the part that guarantees it's a human not a bot viewing the ads as far as I know). So I think it's pretty safe to call them much better than Google and their revenue model is certainly a lot more stable than Firefox's.
prepend 5y ago
I think the key difference is that user data are never shared with a third party, not even Brave. All the ad matching logic is done in client so data doesn’t leave my machine. This is a big difference so using Brave vs Chrome doesn’t result in a company having a record of every site browsed.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> They are no different from Google. Brave lets you turn off the ads. They also pay you cryptocurrency if you decide to turn them on.

psiops 5y ago

The difference is that with Brave you are rewarded for your attention to these ads. That idea has some merit I think, regardless of how it's implemented in Brave.

celsoazevedo 5y ago

The privacy/tracking aspect of Braves Ads (which you don't have to use) seems to be way, way better than Google Adsense. It's like comparing the good ol' fixed "image banner + link" vs Adsense. They're both ads, but one is better than the other. And then you have Chrome sending data directly to Google, the auto logins, dark patterns, etc, which you don't get with Brave or Vivaldi.

judge2020 5y ago
I find it funny that people say this when this is pretty much exactly what FLOC is - the browser choosing your interests and deciding which interests to send to the ad server - but without the "show ads on every website and hold the profits from website owners until they claim it".
- celsoazevedo 5y ago
  > deciding which interests to send to the ad server I was looking at their media kit[0]. They link to a presentation[1] which mentions that the ads are sent to the browser and then the browser itself picks the ones that should be shown to the user. If this is really the case, then the browser isn't sending that information to the ad server. [0] https://brave.com/brave-ads/assets/Brave_Media_Kit.pdf https://brave.com/brave-ads/assets/Brave_Media_Kit.pdf [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEj5ZiQohJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEj5ZiQohJc
  - judge2020 5y ago
    This wouldn’t work for an ad network as big as Google’s, and would further centralize who can serve ads to users (something Google can’t get away with like Brave can).
    - celsoazevedo 5y ago
      > This wouldn’t work for an ad network as big as Google’s Yeah, maybe. I was just pointing out that it doesn't send the user's preferences to a server.
varnaud 5y ago
>The privacy/tracking aspect of Braves Ads (which you don't have to use) seems to be way, way better than Google Adsense Exactly, "seems". Once again, good marketing from the Brave team. Heck, they even sponsored chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura on his Twitch stream.
- marvindanig 5y ago
  The ad industry isn't going away, if you're thinking of a world in the future sans ads. With the Brave's model, at least you are able to make some profit for yourself. It's not utopian, but works from a capitalist's standpoint. And a lot of real users like it!
- celsoazevedo 5y ago
  Can you target users via Brave Ads like you can with Adwords/Adsense? If I understood correctly (I might be wrong - hence the "seems"), you can't because they're not doing anything close to what Google does. I guess my point is that not all tracking or ads are the same. You can track clicks and views of a banner without profiling users across multiple sites and apps, learn all you can, and then let advertisers target them.

miedpo 5y ago

Well I mean, yes, they want their ads to succeed (that's how they can offer a product for free). I don't think there's anything wrong with that. What matters to me is how much data they collect and how they use it. It seems pretty clear to me that they go out of their way to collect less data, and try to be very privacy concious about it. Do you think they are lying about that? I personally don't, and the code is there for us to audit (the only closed source part of the browser is the part that guarantees it's a human not a bot viewing the ads as far as I know). So I think it's pretty safe to call them much better than Google and their revenue model is certainly a lot more stable than Firefox's.

prepend 5y ago

I think the key difference is that user data are never shared with a third party, not even Brave. All the ad matching logic is done in client so data doesn’t leave my machine. This is a big difference so using Brave vs Chrome doesn’t result in a company having a record of every site browsed.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> They are no different from Google. Brave lets you turn off the ads. They also pay you cryptocurrency if you decide to turn them on.