Luke: [00:00:00] From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Malks, VP of Business Operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting Brave browser and search engine, now powering AI with the Brave Search API.

For today’s episode of the brave technologist, we’re going to do a solo episode, take a deeper dive into kind of this whole concept of what user first means. You know, we see this sometimes even in our marketing with Brave, we’ll talk about user first and founder, Brendan Eickhoff, and refers to it when he’s doing public speaking and many of us on the team do.

And there’s a lot to it, I think. But it’s also pretty simple concept. But just at the table for that, I think one area to look at it is kind of this principal agent problem that’s grown in the web. And if you go to brave. com slash blog, you can see the very [00:01:00] first blog post that Brendan Eich wrote about brave and kind of the, problems we’re tackling goes into great detail about this, but it’s pretty simple.

I think, you know, there’s this thing called the principal agent problem. And one thing to think about is like, you know. There’s a principle, which way you can think of lots of examples of this, like, for example the shareholders in a company would be a principle and an agent would be, you know, the corporate management of that company or citizens would be principles and the agents on behalf of those citizens would be the elected officials.

And you can think of a really relatable way of thinking about this is like you know, a government for the people by the people, right? So the people being the principals and the agents being the party that’s working on behalf of that principal. And in theory, you know, the agent should be working for the best interest of that principal.

You know, the case of software, I think, you know, and the web more broadly the web has grown into something massive. And there’s a user and. You know, this kind of boils down to even, even in the technical meeting of the browser is kind of [00:02:00] referred to as that user agent, right? the agent that’s working on behalf of the user.

What’s happened as tech has grown larger and larger is that, you know, there’s been more of this dilemma of the principal agent problem manifesting and a couple examples of this. I mean, big tech is a great one. I think that, you know, if the browser is working on behalf of. the user as their agent you know, the browser should be working for those interests of the user.

And I think, you know, with regard to freezer first principles with brave and kind of what we’re trying to do, but what more broadly, we’re not the only ones trying to do this, but I think at scale, you know, we are becoming one of those examples of how this can work at scale. Potentially, I mean, like every month as we grow as a staff or stack and product and team, et cetera you know, we are proving that this is theory in reality.

And I think that, you know a lot of this too, just to kind of frame it. isn’t necessarily malicious. I think if you look at how tech grows, like in tech has adopted, it’s usually adopted exponentially and you know, my [00:03:00] background I spent a lot of time working in ad tech at a time when you know, advertising technology was exploding.

I mean, you, you were seeing that exponential growth. within a period of less than a decade, less than five years, even most of the way that the sites were monetized on the web was by. each site kind of operating as its own little silo where, you know, advertising buyers would buy from that individual site and that site would have a cookie on the user.

There would be some tracking, but it wasn’t how it became when it exponentially grew. What started to happen, you know, so the, the site property was valued higher. As there was more of a direct relationship between the advertising buyers and the seller users would have~~ a little bit more.~~ little bit less of a pervasive footprint across sites. But what happened, you know, as the technology improves and grows exponentially the thing called programmatic advertising started to really take hold. And this is kind of when people think about things like consumer surveillance or corporate surveillance on consumers or however you want to frame it.

This [00:04:00] is kind of where that. Concept really took hold with the web prior to, you know, you think about it and the timing of this is also interesting too, because it is, you know, if you look at, you know, 2009, 10, 11, and then really same time when you start to see these Snowden revelations coming out about governments that are plugging into big tech following those revelations, you start to see things about new data, warehousing business intelligence this whole vertical within the software industry starts to balloon.

And a lot of it’s related to data. A lot of it’s related to advertising and monetization. But all of a sudden you went from having, you know, three letter agencies that were profiling people to having these big tech companies doing and also having, you know, individual publishers and media entities and other e commerce companies building their own silos of profiles and data, et cetera.

is that, you know, within five years, you saw this almost rapid transformation from individual site kind of having the [00:05:00] control over a lot of the, the buying and selling of the advertising on their site to a different world. That was much more programmatic where. Google and Facebook and other major advertising technology companies were buying up other companies and also just kind of gaining this real big foothold across the web.

So instead of a site actually tracking a user having that profile, it went away from the advertisers caring about buying on a specific site to actually buying audiences that travel the whole web. And before you know it, You know, with, give it another few years and smartphone technologies rapidly picks up people become more and more mobile first.

And then over time your mobile devices start to link with your desktop devices. And before you know it, internet of things comes out and all of a sudden. All of this technology that you are linking your identity, your life to are communicating in these cloud services with these big tech companies.

And no matter where you go. [00:06:00] Online or even offline in a lot of cases you’re leaving a footprint everywhere and economic interests in this pretty perverse and hostile for those users because initially when you, you go to a way that things were, it was a pretty benign model. You know, there might be a cookie drop, but you’re not having that Pervasively follow you everywhere.

and other companies are also taking that cookie, making their version of it, linking it together, syncing these things, profiling. And then when you think about it, you know, if you look at when programmatic advertising very quickly started to kick fire up around 2011, 2012, and then really balloon over time, you’re talking about over a decade’s worth of online data.

That has been collected about you, and then also offline data that’s been collected through data brokers, other forms data collection, etc. And this might seem kind of scary because it kind of is the problem with these things is that these things have been great for monetizing a free web.

making it accessible. But at the core of these [00:07:00] things, it’s very user hostile. We’ve created a very user hostile environment for everybody where you go travel the web and there’s really no reasonable expectation that you’re going Of any type of privacy and these games can backfire in a lot of ways.

I mean if you look at you know, maybe you’re making certain donations. Maybe you’re making purchases of things you know a lot of things that Even more at a core level, you know, you have window shades at your house you browse the web without any protection you’re basically browsing the web with your windows open.

And anybody, including many companies you’ve never heard of are collecting that information. And people might think, well, that’s not really a big deal. I don’t know those companies. Why should I care? But these things become more and more of a big deal over time because we’ve reached a point where.

These technologies have been adopted very quickly and it’s grown exponentially. But now, you’re seeing policies taking place and going into effect that people can leverage that [00:08:00] data that’s been collected against you. Whether you’re making certain personal life decisions, or you’re trying to buy a home, or you’re trying to do a lot of things.

People, we’re at a time now where things unfair, like services unfairly can profile you based off of your browsing behavior. And this does sound, might sound pretty wrong to people because it is pretty wrong. I mean, like, you know, there’s a human instinct that wants privacy and you can’t have freedom without having privacy because ability to create, the ability to learn, the ability to express yourself.

privacy helps you to freely do that. And anyway, I mean, I think, but. What Brave really aims to do and what we’re really trying to do with this whole concept of user first is bring it back to earth, bring it back to basics. What happened and one of the reasons why these technology companies and the technology themselves scaled so quickly was that commercial interests on behalf of advertisers and revenue were not baked in with the user in mind.

They were baked in under the presumption that, you [00:09:00] know, no one was thinking about the user’s data, like, or privacy it was an afterthought. I, I work directly in the space. I can’t tell you how few, Ever conversations took place around privacy. I can actually pretty much say this never happened. In my, you know, decade of working in the space.

And you know, not that people didn’t care. It said it wasn’t top of mind. everyone always assumes that. The other company is going to deal with that problem, or people don’t even realize that is a problem. And that’s the other thing to think about in a world that digital and online, your identity, your data isn’t front and center.

It’s behind the scenes. And so that makes it even more important for companies to be thinking from first principles on, am I building software that is with the interest of the user in mind? Or am I building it on behalf of the interest of somebody else? And when you think of things like web browsers, search engines you know, other forms of, you know, [00:10:00] product stacks that directly engage and are that agent of the user, you had better hope that that software company is building that tool, that piece of software to work on behalf of the interest of the user.

And the problem is that a lot of these companies, most of them almost all of them have built products with commercial interests in mind over the users that serve commercially interests over those of the users. You know, the fact that I can go into Chrome or edge and browse the internet and have all of my information about my browsing behavior.

Going to companies I’ve never heard of without me even knowing it. and people might say, Oh, cookie consent dialogues and these things that people don’t know, people will blaster that you shouldn’t have a reasonable expectation that every user is going to understand what any of this means. As a software companies, we should be the custodians of good interests on behalf of the user.

And that means. Really thinking about those practical cases where you can make design decisions [00:11:00] that are for the benefit of the user. And a lot of this kind of boils down to like really basic concepts around privacy, security. Agency and, really just you know, ease of use and usability.

And one of those things, I mean, I think we can look at kind of how Brave has approached this as an example of how others can too. And a lot of the time, what you really need is that first, that first person company example that breaks through and starts to say, look, you know, We can’t, we need to create software and create an internet that’s user first, that puts the user’s interests first.

But we also cannot do this with blinders on and do this in a way that’s impractical. You know, businesses still need to be able to transact on the web and for all intents and purposes Businesses do useful things on the web. We don’t want to isolate an entire mega industry of one of the most successful models in the world.

because the approach has been off. We want businesses to work with people and users on the web. It’s key. I [00:12:00] mean, it’s a machine, it’s a giant. Anyway, so I think that, you know, what Brave has really done is, to try to lead by example, because. You’re not going to get this win by politicians, regulators are not going to be the ones to determine they’re not building a software.

They aren’t educated on the problems until they meet with these companies and or other experts and learn about them. And it’s foolish to wait for perfection on that front because it’s never going to come. And the reality is, is that. You know, these big tech companies have grown into such, you know, the revenues that, rival the GDPs other countries, right?

These are massive numbers. They can litigate forever. a lot of the ethos has been to break things and deal with the cleanup later. there really haven’t been very many companies that have thought like more holistically of like, well, what if we just built something from the beginning that wasn’t intended to, like, that actually like looked out for the user’s privacy.

And a lot of what we do at Brave is, based on that. And we are called a privacy product often, and that’s mainly to relate to other privacy products out there [00:13:00] and kind of count it down under the status quo. But I think it all rolls up under this user first principle, because if you are Putting the user’s interests at heart are being user first.

You are protecting their privacy by default, period. Like the user is in control of their information. The user can knowingly go and broadcast their information. I mean, look at social media, like it’s a great example, but in that same example There is also like the same user that’s broadcasting information at will, that they want to broadcast wouldn’t want everybody looking at their DMS on social media They want their privacy when they need their privacy. And so we should be creating software that protects privacy by default. And that’s what break does. And so I think, you know, That doesn’t mean, you know, a lot of this gets kind of like sucked down into this world of like us versus them ad blocking kills the internet business model, yada, yada, yada.

Well, the thing that initially drew me to Brave was that they were actually the first company I saw that said, no we actually want to make this work, we want to make [00:14:00] business work with privacy and it can, and, you know, commercial interests aren’t predatory in every circumstance. So a lot of times.

Things actually are helpful that companies are putting out there for people. This is proven when you buy a product that you see online, like you’re getting something that you want. And so what really has to get fixed here is there’s this mix between why are businesses tracking users behavior?

And a lot of this comes down to accounting really. I mean, like the problem with, you know, a company wants to know that if I’m putting something out there, am I going to reach the person I want to reach? And am I going to be able to verify or validate that those dollars that I spent were actually bringing me something in return, like a purchase or, you know some kind of signup or whatever.

And you know, the fundamentals are pretty easy. Like I think, you know, we’ve gotten to a point with technology where you can account for things where you can use, you know, zero knowledge encryption and other, other Types of methodology to have a very accurate accounting of what’s happening without having to know.

[00:15:00] Or broadcast that a, an individual user did the thing, which the old model of the web and the one that’s still pervasive is the one that basically just, you know, we’ll broadcast these things out there for other parties to pick up on. And so. a great fit for this initially was with ad blocking because ad blockers, a main use for them, aside from the fact that, you know, ads are just plastered everywhere on the web and getting between you and what you’re, you’re trying to do that experience has just been horrible.

I think the other angle on has been a privacy one with ad blocking. blocking those trackers that collecting your information without you knowing it and seeing that number go up every site and over year after year after year, the number is getting higher and higher and higher. and more and more of your data is being collected.

But ad blockers brought this great way to block those things their extensions. But the ad blockers are only one part of the problem. The ad blockers are not solving For building a model that respects the user’s privacy. That’s user first that you can still conduct business in. And so with the absence of that brave enters [00:16:00] the market says two things, like one we’re entering the market with a browser, a browser knows what the user’s doing locally.

You have a browser, has your history, et cetera. And you know, the browser is the user’s agent. So we’re going to build user first principles into this browser. Users are going to have privacy by default. We’re going to build in things like self custody, where the user is in control of their assets.

They can have a key that they hold the responsibility for, that then they can use like their regular wallet or the door keys to their house and enter the door, do the thing. Without someone else having to take care of custody of their funds. All these things are kind of built into the software. And I think it also evolves around design decisions.

Aside from the fact that you’re building a universe where you can have businesses and users. Interchanging and exchanging value without the user having to compromise their privacy just for the thing to work. Like that’s a main pillar, but there’s other things that are related to user first [00:17:00] principles as well.

For example, like self custody is one example that I used that, you know, User first tool that you can freely transact at will and have accessibility into markets with new technology. Another angle on this as well is around design decisions. are you putting the user in mind? Like with those features that you’re trying to do, are they, Dark patterns that are going, are trying to trick the user into giving up a piece of information or doing a thing without you know, informing them of what they’re trying to do, right?

These are important design decisions that user first company will address, whether that’s in policy or privacy reviews in advance or other forms of processes that can be put in place. But so much of the web is devolved into like trying to trick users into gimmickry and other things like that.

When you’re building software, that user first you have to accept that. And then you have to say, okay, step back. Like how can we make something that’s honoring the user first? And then finally, I think, you know, the other point in what What we’ve done with advertising models, especially our opt in one at Brave where [00:18:00] are browsing the web.

You know, in the old model, users data was being extracted and then basically sold out on per page basis, maybe indirectly, but, point is, is that advertisers were bidding based on that data that was collected and profile. so the value of that data is higher with the more that you have, the more sophistication that that profile has.

Right? So, like, instead of having a model where users are basically harvested in a mega stack of companies are, you know, growing off of the profits of those you know, add transactions build in the ability for users that want to be able to, to actually earn a revenue share.

Because the reality of all of this is that if you do not have a model where a user is involved, you have no model. The internet is built off of users engaging with things, viewing things, going from place to place. If you’re not valuing that or including that in the revenue exchange on that, then you’re not really honoring the users first.

And so what we’ve done with Brave Rewards and with the basic attention token is [00:19:00] basically set another example in the market of, look, not only are you going to be shielded from user hostile things through privacy and security and good other protections. But also like you as a user deserve to be cut into an economic model where it makes sense, where your, parties are going to benefit otherwise.

Right? Like, and so things like rewards where you browse the internet and your attention, you’re earning with it. Your attention is fungible my attention, your attention, we’re spending time listening to this podcast. These things you know, they’re not, they’re not non fungible, right? Like it’s not Luke’s attention only.

And that’s value to X is it’s everyone has human attention. So the idea here is that, you know, Cutting the users in on that is something that hasn’t really been done very well in a non exploitive way. And it’s something that we’ve taken to market and scaled to tens of millions of users with brave.

And I think that, you know, You’re seeing more and more companies starting to take these user first approaches. At first, it was very much kicking and screaming and some many of them still are. But I think that, you know, it takes an [00:20:00] example in the market to lead with user first. And I think that you’re starting to see these principles land in a more substantial way over time.

And it’s one thing that, you know, we’re trying to do with this podcast. We’re trying to do a brave, we’re trying to do with every user is listen to them. You know, have this deniability, like, for example some companies will have a claim, a strong privacy position and that they care. But they’re making design decisions that involve collecting the user’s data when they could just process it discard it.

But you’re, creating this area. For these companies, security breaches happen even if you’re the best custodians of that user data collecting in the first place is putting that user at risk. And so the other thing to think about here is, is what deniability can you build in between you and your users?

And as a user are you using products that in making decisions in those products that looking out for your own interest to like, do you really need to let Microsoft absorb all of your data, like with your operating system to your browser to your phone, [00:21:00] right? same thing with Google, same thing with everybody, right?

Like are you using a software that takes care to limit how much data that they collect on you? Because they don’t want to know about it. They don’t want to know you as a user. Like that’s kind of the winning formula. If you don’t, they don’t have your data, then nobody can come and subpoena that data or steal that data or that trust you’re forming, you trust a brand more because they don’t need to know you.

and I think that more and more software should be built that way. And that’s certainly the model we’re putting out there with Brave. And you know, and part of this whole thing. So Brave’s not just about privacy or security or, you know web3 AI, all these things, like all roll up under this whole theory, this whole belief in, in not theory, but just belief in users first.

Putting the interest of the user first, am I building a piece of software that is looking out for the user that is really like, whether it’s, how we’re putting the menu placement, whether it’s how you opt into something, whether it’s a warning in a [00:22:00] transaction flow that might, you might not be aware of not exposing yourself.

How much of this can we build in to automatically just work? Like and make it easy for people. And in a lot of the RIF, when you look at privacy, security tooling, and, and even a lot of empowering tooling, right? Like, like accessibility to markets and things like that. A lot of the issues have been technical and usable ones where you have really smart people that are building really great technology.

And so building in these user first approaches into technology, it’s not just, am I making things that prompt users and about the right things? But a lot of this is around just building in sound practices and decisions into the automatically work. So do, for example, like when you have analytics and diagnostics, you need to run, are you, are you Can you process that information anonymously from the user where it’s not just anonymized in the cloud, but you don’t even need to collect the user’s I.

D. to begin [00:23:00] with and a lot of these things have to be approached from across the entire stack. So it’s not just like what the user directly engages with. It’s also how the product is designed to work and how the diagnostics are designed to work. And it requires an ethos more than a single approach.

And I think that, you know, what we’re aiming to do with Brave is basically create that ethos and apply it through software that puts users first, very simply. With whatever we’re doing. So it means privacy, security design decisions utility tools, et cetera. Really looking out for the user. And I think that, you know, we’ll see this and continue to see this with continued growth.

But the original theory was if we put the user first business models and show businesses how they can do this, or at least how to work with a partner that does this, or be a customer for a service that does this, like, that’s Then we can show that you don’t need to collect all this information without the user knowing about it in order to [00:24:00] have something that effectively works and efficiently works and can actually, you know, accurately account for the business that you’re trying to do.

And when you think about it in the landscape that we’re in, where data has become a huge liability for businesses that, you know, breaches inevitably happen. And if you accept that humans are going to screw up sometimes and that systems aren’t perfect, then. Your approach really should be like if I’m putting the user first, how can I do what I need to do without having to collect any information at all or as little information as possible?

Or instead of collecting it, how quickly can I process something and get rid of it? Are there ways that I can process it where I don’t need to know who that person is? And I think that these things are going to continue to go forward and more companies like Brave that will adopt these things, user first principles will, you know, you’ll see this kind of.

Proliferate because there’s a need when people going through data breaches and having vulnerabilities and exploits and things like that apply to your everyday life, it hurts and people don’t want to have to experience that. [00:25:00] And so the market will react with this over time. Liability is concern for these companies over time AI is making it so that these things become improved in some ways, but worse than others.

And so, you know, it really starts with, are you building something that puts users first? And I’m excited to be at Brave and that we’ve, you know, been able to grow to the level that we’re at, you know, almost 80 million monthly active users have moved with their feet to a solution that Puts users first, whether that’s for the ad blocking or for the privacy or for having a stronger ethos or for, you know, challenging the incumbents and just the simple fact that we care about the user.

And we don’t just say it, but care comes through in the software that’s open source and auditable. It comes through with the engagement with our users directly, whether it’s myself or CEO or CTO co founders team. We care about the users and we hope that other companies continue to kind of carry this ethos as well, and that Brave can be an example for all these other companies to follow whether that’s startups or even the big guys that you know, [00:26:00] are already out there.

So I hope that you learned something about user first. We kind of covered how, you know, privacy is just a part of it. Design decisions are a part of it. Security is a part of it. Self custody is part of it. but really Can’t have freedom without privacy. You can’t empower users without putting them first.

and the beauty of the internet is that it is this way to have accessibility and empowerment and and ability to connect the world and to kind of create your own destiny if we’re putting users first. So hope you enjoyed the solo podcast today. We’ll be sure to link to Brennan’s first blog post in the show notes, hopefully so that you all can take a look at the post that converted me many years ago to come work here, but yeah, and as always DMs are open on, on X and Twitter so feel free to reach out and have a great one.

Talk to you on the next one. Thanks for listening to the brave technologist podcast to never miss an episode. Make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the brave browser, you can download it for free today at brave.

com. And start using Brave Search, which enables you to search the web privately. Brave also shields you from the ads, trackers, and other creepy stuff following you across the [00:27:00] web.