Brave’s latest news

Brave input to California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA)

Oct 29, 2019

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.

Accurately Predicting Ad Blocker Savings

Oct 21, 2019

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 reaches 8 million monthly active users and delivers nearly 400 privacy-preserving ad campaigns

Oct 16, 2019

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.

Brave highlights critical CCPA omission in letter to the Attorney General of California

Oct 15, 2019

Brave has written to the Attorney General of California to highlight a critical omission in the CCPA regulations proposed last week.

Brave writes to all European governments to press for strong ePrivacy protections

Oct 10, 2019

Brave has written to EU Member States to urge the prohibition of cookie walls, and the inclusion of privacy by default, in the ePrivacy Regulation.

Competition issues in digital markets

Oct 7, 2019

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.

zkSENSE: a privacy-preserving mechanism for bot detection in mobile devices

Oct 7, 2019

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.

Brave Partners with Uphold to Launch Wallet That Rewards Users for Browsing

Oct 3, 2019

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.

VPN⁰: A Privacy-Preserving Distributed Virtual Private Network

Oct 2, 2019

This research presents VPN⁰, the first distributed virtual private network offering a privacy preserving traffic authorization and validation mechanism.

Why marketers must conduct GDPR Data Protection Impact Assessments of RTB

Sep 24, 2019

This note examines the GDPR requirement that marketers conduct data protection impact assessments (DPIAs) when buying digital media using “real-time bidding” advertising.

Brave Tops Browser First-Run Network Traffic Results

Sep 18, 2019

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.

Brave uncovers Google’s GDPR workaround

Sep 4, 2019

Brave presents new RTB evidence, and has uncovered a mechanism by which Google appears to be circumventing its purported GDPR privacy protections.

Wikipedia is now a Brave Verified Publisher, Ready to Receive BAT Donations from Brave Users

Aug 28, 2019

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has joined the Brave platform as a Verified Publisher. Created in 2001, Wikipedia is edited and verified by volunteers around the world.

Privacy-Preserving Product Analytics (P3A)

Aug 22, 2019

Most of the software you use includes some sort of product analytics, or usage data collection, as does every major browser. And for good reason — knowing which features are resonating and which need work is an important part of making software that’s a pleasure to use.

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

Aug 20, 2019

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 logins

Response to IAB Europe statement on its failure to answer the Irish Data Protection Commission

Aug 13, 2019

Dr Johnny Ryan responds to IAB Europe. Four months on, both I and the Data Protection Commission are still waiting for the first explanation of how “IAB Europe is confident that the way it obtains consent for the use of cookies on its website complies with the requirements of the law”.