Brave 1.0 was released on November 13th and received very positive press reviews, and also saw a surge in user adoption. Brave went from 8.7 million monthly active users in October to 10.4 million MAU at the end of November, a 19% increase across all platforms. This represents a doubling of Brave’s MAU in one year. Daily active users tripled this year, to 3.3 million. The Brave browser combines privacy with a blockchain-based digital advertising platform, and offers 3-6x faster browsing than other browsers.
San Francisco – November 13, 2019 – Brave Software, makers of the innovative Brave browser which combines privacy with a blockchain-based digital advertising platform, today announced the official launch of Brave 1.0. The Brave open source browser fundamentally shifts how users, publishers, and advertisers interact online by giving users a private, safer, and 3-6x faster browsing experience, while funding the Web through a new attention-based platform of privacy-preserving advertisements and rewards. In addition to desktop and Android devices, Brave’s private ads and payment platform (Brave Rewards) is now available for iPhones and iPads.
Brave exposes an inflection point in the online ecosystem, with more users feeling increasingly concerned with protecting their online privacy and fed up with big tech. Whether due to recent data privacy investigations, high-profile breaches, or emerging government regulations, online privacy is a rising concern for users across the nation. According to a new survey of 1,500 U.S. web users conducted by Brave Software, 76 percent of users feel more concerned with protecting their online privacy than they did one year ago, and 88 percent wish they had more control over how large companies like Google and Facebook use their personal data. It’s time for a change.
Over the past 4 ½ years I've been helping to build a "big" new startup named Brave. It's been a wild ride, far exceeding anything I could have imagined. The company has grown from a team of 2, to over 100 passionate mission-driven teammates. Our user base has grown to 8.7 million monthly active users. Our users help support over 300,000 registered content creators via micropayments. And our community is growing and thriving more every day.
This post first summarizes what browser fingerprinting is, and common defenses. Second, the post presents problems with “dynamic privacy approaches”, and why Brave is skeptical they are effective for protecting against fingerprinting. Third, the post presents Brave’s fingerprinting protections, current, upcoming and longer-term.
Brave to be Featured on Everipedia Homepage, Everipedia Ads to be Featured within Brave - GRAND CAYMAN, Cayman Islands – October 30, 2019: Everipedia, the world’s largest blockchain-based encyclopedia, and Brave, a privacy browser combined with a blockchain-based digital advertising platform, today announced a co-marketing agreement. The partnership will initially result in a campaign aimed at boosting both brands among their respective communities and is the first step towards a deeper collaboration.
Privacy laws need to be overhauled, which is why Brave is asking Californians to support its California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and help change the internet.
We have written before on Brave’s performance, energy and bandwidth benefits for the user. Brave Shields is our primary mechanism for protecting user privacy, but many users know by now that ad and tracker blocking (or just ad blocking for short) makes the web faster and generally better for them. So far Brave’s estimates of the users’ time saved have been very conservative and somewhat naive: we take the total number of ads and trackers blocked, and multiply that by 50 milliseconds.
Brave is growing on the user front, with daily active users passing the 2.8 million mark recently, and monthly active users now at 8 million. There are also over 290,000 Brave Verified Publishers.
This note presents a submission from Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, and Dr Orla Lynskey of the London School of Economics, to the UK Competition & Markets Authority.
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 valuable feedback of Prof. Alastair R. Beresford of the University of Cambridge. Bots are automated programs that often mimic human behavior for monetary or criminal purposes. They have become a serious and pervasive problem for many industries, especially for the online advertising market. In 2013, it was discovered that the Chameleon botnet harvested around 6 million dollars per month from advertisers. The proliferation and the wide variety of mobile devices created opportunities for fraudsters to gain profit by abusing the ad ecosystem and exploiting low-cost mobile devices. In particular, recent news has reported that phone farmers have been using bots to automate phone clicks and touch movements to generate revenue from ad views.
BAT Rewards can now be transferred into users’ Uphold accounts. With today’s updated Brave browser for desktop (0.69), Brave users can choose to transfer Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) out of their Brave Rewards wallet and convert the tokens to many digital assets and fiat currencies, after completing a verification process with digital money platform Uphold. Previously, the Brave browser wallet was unidirectional, and its sole purpose was to anonymously and securely contribute to online publishers of the user’s choosing.
This research presents VPN⁰, the first distributed virtual private network offering a privacy preserving traffic authorization and validation mechanism.
This note examines the GDPR requirement that marketers conduct data protection impact assessments (DPIAs) when buying digital media using “real-time bidding” advertising.
What this post explores today is how browsers behave by default, on their first-run, with no preexisting user profile. By default, Brave blocks third-party trackers (and the ads that rely on them). It also prevents fingerprinting, auto-play of media, crypto-mining, and access to media input devices.
