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 the Web privacy community in many ways, including by developing privacy tools for users and developers, sharing our research on Web privacy, and advocating for privacy in Web standards.
Brave will be supporting the Web privacy community in another way, by funding and supporting the growth and maintenance of tracking and advertising blocking filter lists. Brave uses many such lists, some of which Brave maintains, some developed through online communities (EasyList and EasyPrivacy), and some generated by other terrific Web privacy activists. Filter lists help prevent websites from sharing your information with advertisers and trackers, make websites load faster, and save you data.
Currently, much of this filter-list work is done by volunteers. Brave will be contracting with Ryan Brown (aka “FanBoy” of “Fanboy Adblock Lists”) to support his work maintaining EasyList and EasyPrivacy. Ryan is currently the top committer to these lists, and has been maintaining them as a volunteer. Brave will now be supporting Ryan’s work, so that he can both continue building out these lists for all tools using them, and to spend additional time addressing issues Brave users have been encountering.
Just as with all of Brave’s work, all of Ryan’s work will be public. Wherever possible, his improvements will be pushed upstream to common lists like EasyList and EasyPrivacy (we expect in the vast majority of cases). And even in cases where Ryan’s work is specific to Brave’s needs, it’ll still be public in Brave’s repos.
We’re excited to continue our work protecting privacy on the Web. Improving the filter lists Brave uses is just one of many ways we’re working towards this goal. We’ll be announcing many other new efforts and projects too in the coming months. Stay tuned!
