Blog category

Policy & legislation

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 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.

Requirement Analysis of Decentralized Virtual Private Networks (dVPNs)

May 23, 2019

In this blogpost we explore the ecosystem of decentralized Virtual Private Networks (dVPNs), a new form of VPNs with no central authority. DVPNs are fairly recent VPN solutions where the users are both client and server, in the sense that when they join a dVPN they also offer a portion of their upload bandwidth to carry traffic for other users.

Ad Tech GDPR complaint is extended to four more European regulators

May 20, 2019

GDPR complaints about Real-Time Bidding (RTB) in the online advertising industry were filed today with Data Protection Authorities in Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.  The complaints detail the vast scale of personal data leakage by Google and other major companies in the “Ad Tech” industry. This week marks one year since the introduction of the GDPR. 

A worrying adtech exemption to California’s new privacy law

Apr 16, 2019

Brave writes to the California Senate Judiciary Committee, opposing a new adtech exemption in the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA). Brave also co-signs today's letter from 28 technology companies supporting the Privacy For All amendment to fix loopholes in the CCPA.