Blog
Security & Privacy Category
Brave Introduces Brave Today, the Privacy-Preserving News Reader Integrated Into the Browser
The Brave Today news reader is accessible below the new tab page and is delivered anonymously to the user’s browser via Brave’s new private content delivery network.
Brave Private Content Delivery Network
Brave is a company where privacy isn’t just a feature; it’s a requirement. This is perhaps most obvious in the Brave Browser, where we block trackers, prevent fingerprinting, and include a privacy-preserving, opt-in and user-first ad-system, but Brave’s focus on privacy goes far beyond the browser.
How we Choose and Rank Content in Brave Today
We’re using Brave’s new private CDN to fetch RSS feeds anonymously and the browser’s personalization capabilities to rank headlines with a simple algorithm that will make the experience interesting for everyone.
Brave Complies With Apple iOS Guidelines, Will Continue to Innovate for Users and Creators They Support
Brave is releasing a new version of our iOS browser in order to comply with recent stipulations made by Apple.
Brave and Gala Games Partner to Feature BAT Support in New Mirandus Game
Cyber Monday Promotion Gives Brave Users 25% Discount for Land Deed Purchases with BAT Gala Games, the blockchain games studio expanding the network of player-owned game assets, and Brave, makers of the innovative Brave browser combining privacy with the Basic...
Binance Widget Now Available to Brave Android Users, Allowing Easy Trading, Buying, and Managing of Cryptocurrency
Today’s Brave Android browser update (version 1.17) features the Binance widget, which is already available to Brave desktop users and was the first exchange-browser integration of its kind last April. Brave Android users can now seamlessly trade and manage...
What’s Brave Done For My Privacy Lately? Episode #6: Fighting CNAME Trickery
This post discusses a recent technique trackers use, CNAME cloaking, and a new feature in Brave that keeps Brave users protected.
WebBundles Harmful to Content Blocking, Security Tools, and the Open Web (Standards Updates #2)
This is second in a series of blog posts describing new and proposed web standards and how they support or threaten web privacy. This post is written by Senior Privacy Researcher Peter Snyder (@pes10k). In a Nutshell… Google is proposing a new standard...
Johnny Ryan takes a new role with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, after two years as Brave’s Chief Policy and Industry Relations Officer
Brave today announced that Dr Johnny Ryan, FRHistS, Brave’s Chief Policy and Industry Relations Officer, is departing from Brave to join the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. He will also take up a Senior Fellow position at the Open Markets Institute.
What’s Brave Done For My Privacy Lately #5: Grab Bag
In order to stay one step ahead of online trackers, Brave regularly releases new privacy features and improvements. This post discusses three recent changes in Brave that each help make the web a more privacy, and person, respecting platform.
What’s Brave Done For My Privacy Lately? Episode #4: Fingerprinting Defenses 2.0
Brave is redesigning its browser fingerprinting defenses to build on the randomization-based techniques discussed in the previous post. These new defenses provide stronger and more web-compatible protections by default…
Browser First-Run: iOS Edition
The following review was conducted by Sampson, Senior Developer Relations Specialist at Brave. Last year I did a review of several popular desktop browsers, focusing exclusively on what they do when you launch the browser for the first time. Months later, an...
What’s Brave Done For My Privacy Lately? Episode #3: Fingerprint Randomization
Brave now protects users from being fingerprinted by making them appear subtly different to each website. Browser fingerprinting protection is available today in our Nightly version. These new protections both provide the strongest fingerprinting protections of any popular browser, and work without introducing bothersome permission prompts or breaking websites.
What’s Brave Done For My Privacy Lately? Episode #2: Third-Party Cosmetic Filtering
Problem: Blocking Trackers Sometimes Breaks Sites. One of many ways Brave protects your privacy on the Web is by blocking requests to trackers. By blocking these requests, Brave prevents you from being followed around the Web, and from ad companies, data brokers, and other privacy-harming parties from recording your online activity.
OK Google, don’t delay real browser privacy until 2022
Google recently announced that their Chrome Web browser will — with luck, and if a bunch of other conditions come to pass — probably start blocking third-party cookies.
What’s Brave Done For My Privacy Lately-Episode #1: Web Resource Replacements (replacing tracking code with privacy-preserving code that keeps sites working well)
Problem: Blocking Trackers Sometimes Breaks Sites. One of many ways Brave protects your privacy on the Web is by blocking requests to trackers. By blocking these requests, Brave prevents you from being followed around the Web, and from ad companies, data brokers, and other privacy-harming parties from recording your online activity.
Brave, Fingerprinting, and Privacy Budgets
This work was written by Peter Snyder, Privacy researcher at Brave, and Dr. Ben Livshits, Brave's Chief Scientist. One of Brave’s core goals is to protect peoples’ privacy online, and to prevent online trackers from following you around the Web. Brave protects users...
zkSENSE: a privacy-preserving mechanism for bot detection in mobile devices
This research was conducted by Stan (Jiexin) Zhang, a research intern at Brave and a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Panagiotis Papadopoulos, Security Researcher at Brave, and Dr. Ben Livshits, Chief Scientist at Brave. We gratefully acknowledge the...
VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed Virtual Private Network
This research presents VPN⁰, the first distributed virtual private network offering a privacy preserving traffic authorization and validation mechanism. This research was conducted by Dr. Matteo Varvello (Performance Researcher at Brave), Iñigo Querejeta-Azurmendi...
Brave Tops Browser First-Run Network Traffic Results
What does a browser do when you first launch it? One of the first things most of us do when sitting down at our computer is launch a web browser. By and large, we’re usually re-launching a browser that we were using hours before. As such, we’re picking up where we...
Privacy-Preserving Product Analytics (P3A)
Introduction At Brave, we want our browser not only to provide the best protection against the surveillance economy, but to be the very best way to experience the web. We rely extensively on community feedback to make sure that the product provides the most vital...
With Yubico partnership and support for the new YubiKey 5Ci, Brave is the first web browser to offer secure phishing-resistant authentication via robust security keys on iPhones & iPads
Earlier this summer, Brave and Yubico announced a partnership to bring YubiKey support to Brave for iOS. Yubico is the leading provider of hardware security keys which use the U2F and WebAuthn protocols to provide secure phishing-resistant authentication for online...
Brave Improves Its Ad-Blocker Performance by 69x with New Engine Implementation in Rust
This blog was written by Dr. Andrius Aucinas, performance researcher at Brave, and Dr. Ben Livshits, Brave’s Chief Scientist. Brave Shields, which protect users’ privacy from trackers and ads, are one of the cornerstone components of the browser involved in handling...
Adding YubiKey Support to Brave for iOS
We're excited to partner with Yubico to bring YubiKey support to Brave for iOS. Yubico is the leading provider of hardware authentication security keys — devices which protect logins to online accounts from phishing, man-in-the-middle, and other threats of account...
Supporting The Web Privacy Community
Brave is a proud member of the Web privacy community. Brave relies on the terrific work of the Tor Project, EasyList/EasyPrivacy communities, Disconnect, and the uBlock Origin/uMatrix projects, among many others, to protect Brave users’ privacy. Brave contributes to...
Requirement Analysis of Decentralized Virtual Private Networks (dVPNs)
Despite some advantages over VPNs, current solutions for dVPNs lack strong privacy and performance guarantees. This research was conducted by Dr. Matteo Varvello, performance researcher at Brave, and Dr. Ben Livshits, Brave’s Chief Scientist. In this blogpost we...
Brave’s Concerns with the Client-Hints Proposal
Web Standards and User Privacy: Brave’s Concerns with the Client-Hints Proposal By Brave employees Pete Snyder, privacy researcher, Pranjal Jumde, security engineer, Tom Lowenthal, product manager for privacy and security, and Brian Clifton, development manager for...
Blockchain MarTech Industry Grows by 1,218% in 18 months
Never Stop Marketing Research and Brave Software Collaborate to Help Enterprise Marketers Harness Blockchain Potential Rapidly New York and San Francisco, February 13, 2019 ---- Never Stop Marketing Research, the leading research firm on the intersection of blockchain...
Script Blocking Exceptions Update
We have received many questions about script blocking exceptions being reported by several news outlets and blogs. This conversation is about script loading, not tracking. Loading a script from an edge-cache does not track a user without third-party cookies or...
Brave Previews Opt-in Ads in Desktop Browser Developer Channel
New online advertising model upends current systemwith 70% revenue share to users and privacy by designToday we’re previewing our new digital advertising model in Brave’s Developer channel. Developers and testers using the latest desktop browser build for macOS and...
Brave passes 5.5 million monthly active users and features over 28,000 Verified Publishers
2018 highlights include 5X MAU growth, major product redesigns, and key partnershipsAs we look ahead to 2019 and our upcoming Brave 1.0 release with Brave Ads that will reward users for their attention with Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), we wanted to share some of our...
Brave requests European Commission antitrust examination of online ad market
Investigation needed to stop anticompetitive practices that hurt publishers, restrict innovation, and limit consumer choice.
38 businesses and organizations urge European Governments to break ePrivacy deadlock
Brave and a coalition of more than 30 businesses and organizations urges European Governments to break the deadlock on the ePrivacy Regulation in an open letter.
French regulator shows deep flaws in IAB’s consent framework and RTB
French regulator’s decision against Vectaury confirms that IAB “Transparency & Consent Framework” does not obtain valid consent, and illustrates how even tiny adtech companies can unlawfully gather millions of people’s personal data from the online advertising “real time bidding system” (RTB).
Brave calls for a “United States GDPR” in letter to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration
Brave presents the case for a US federal privacy law that builds on the GDPR, protecting innovation, interoperability, and supporting US leadership.
AMA with Sampson
Welcome to the sixth post in our series of BAT Community-run AMAs. The ongoing AMA series on Reddit is a seven-month-long event that features various guests from the Brave and BAT teams. The goal of the series is twofold: to give fans of the project an opportunity to...
AMA with Yan Zhu
Welcome to the fifth post in our series of BAT Community-run AMAs. The ongoing AMA series on Reddit is a six-month-long event that features various guests from the Brave and BAT teams. The goal of the series is twofold: to give fans of the project an opportunity to...
Why GDPR is Kryptonite to Google & Facebook on Anti-Trust
This is Brave’s response to a call for stakeholder input from the European Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager.
AMA with David Temkin
Welcome to the fourth post in our series of BAT Community-run AMAs. The ongoing AMA series on Reddit is a six-month-long event that features various guests from the Brave and BAT teams. The goal of the series is twofold: to give fans of the project an opportunity to...
Brendan Eich writes to the US Senate: we need a GDPR for the United States
A ruling of the European Court of Justice this month in the “Facebook fan page case” exposes marketers to severe legal risk from programmatic advertising.
Civic to Offer Secure Identity Verification Services on the Brave Publisher Platform
Brave-verified Publishers with Civic Reusable KYC will be able to collect earned BATs with their own Ethereum wallets Civic, the global digital identity leader, and Brave, an innovative privacy browser combined with a blockchain-based digital advertising...
Fast and Private Brave Browser Chooses Qwant as its Default Search Engine in France and Germany
PARIS, France, and SAN FRANCISCO, USA -- September 13th, 2018 - Brave, which combines an innovative privacy browser with a blockchain-based digital advertising platform, and Qwant, the European search engine that respects the privacy of its users, announced...
Regulatory complaint concerning massive, web-wide data breach by Google and other “ad tech” companies under Europe’s GDPR
Latest updates: read more about the RTB complaints. Mail list: receive updates & research notes in your inbox. Dublin, Ireland and London, United Kingdom, Wednesday, 12 September 2018 -- Simultaneous complaints have been filed with European data protection...
AMA with Johnny Ryan
Welcome to the third post in our series of BAT Community-run AMAs. The ongoing AMA series on Reddit is a six-month long event that features various guests from the Brave and BAT teams. The goal of the series, which will run until January 2019, is twofold: to give fans...
Few Realize “Private Mode” Is Not Really Private
This ongoing research is being conducted by Ruba Abu-Salma, a Ph.D student in Computer Science from University College London (UCL), and Brave’s Chief Scientist, Dr. Ben Livshits. The final findings will be submitted as a paper in the next several weeks....
AMA with Brian Bondy
On August 16th, the BAT Community successfully kicked off an AMA (Ask Me Anything!) series with CEO and co-founder Brendan Eich. The series, scheduled to run from August 2018 through January 2019, features several different guests from the Brave team every month and...
AMA with Brendan Eich
On August 16th, BAT Community hosted the first in an upcoming series of AMAs (Ask Me Anything!) with Brendan Eich in the r/BATProject subreddit. Over the course of the AMA, Brendan answered a mix of pre-submitted and live questions from Redditors about Brave and the...
Understanding Redirection-Based Tracking
This blog post describes ongoing work conducted at Brave by Peter Snyder and Ben Livshits. It is the third in a series of research-oriented posts that share both present investigations and future vision. We are constantly looking to improve and automate the privacy...
Brave Browser iOS App Now Offers DuckDuckGo Search in Private Tabs
We recently partnered with DuckDuckGo to improve privacy on the web by integrating a new DuckDuckGo search feature within Private Tabs in Brave’s desktop browser. We’re excited to announce that this feature is now available to Brave iOS (version 1.6.3) users to give...
Into the Blockchain: Brave with MetaMask
The decentralized web is there for exploring. Trails are being blazed with decentralized applications built on the Ethereum blockchain, with the MetaMask extension providing a bridge to explore and handle decentralized applications (Dapps) from a web browser....
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