Serious Discussion The Privacy Illusion: How Brave Browser Built Its Own Surveillance Machine

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The Privacy Illusion: How Brave Browser Built Its Own Surveillance Machine - Cambridge Analytica

Brendan Eich's 2015 promise was seductive in its simplicity: a browser that blocks trackers, ads, and the entire apparatus of surveillance capitalism.
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Brendan Eich’s 2015 promise was seductive in its simplicity: a browser that blocks trackers, ads, and the entire apparatus of surveillance capitalism. Seven years later, Brave has attracted 60 million monthly active users with that vision. What those users largely don’t understand is that Brave replaced Google’s tracking with its own.
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When Brave users open their browser, they see notifications about trackers blocked. They see ads removed from websites. They experience something genuinely better than Chrome or Firefox with no adblocker.

What they don’t see is their behavioral profile being constructed, refined, and monetized in real time. The company provides no dashboard showing what Brave knows about them. No breakdown of which behavioral categories you’ve been assigned to. No visibility into what advertisers can purchase about you.
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It is just a fast browser with very good blocking of ads; no privacy is guaranteed unless you create your own browser.
 
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That article was a very good read. One take away (besides others) I got was this:
Firefox’s Privacy-First Default: Mozilla has moved toward stricter privacy protections without building its own ad network. It generates revenue through search partnerships and donations, not behavioral targeting. This is more privacy-protective but generates less revenue. Brave chose the higher-revenue path.
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The broader pattern: privacy-washing replaces privacy protection as the business model. Companies like Brave serve a social function—they make surveillance feel optional and chosen, rather than imposed. This legitimizes surveillance capitalism more effectively than Google’s transparency ever could.


Understanding this requires recognizing that Brave didn’t solve the surveillance problem. It professionalized and rebranded it for users who wanted to believe surveillance had ended. That rebranding is complete. The surveillance continues.
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This is indicative of why Frank Zappa had an album entitled "We're Only In For The Money". :ROFLMAO:
 
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It's an interesting piece, but it also appears to be highly opinionated and slanted. Obviously, privacy is difficult to preserve on the Internet.

This is more surveillance than Google conducts through Chrome alone. Google doesn’t own search query data for most Chrome users (they search through Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.), so they see only a partial behavioral profile. Brave sees everything.
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One of the reasons Google invests an upwards of $1B in Chrome every year is that the default search engine is Google, and it has extremely tight integration with a massive Google ecosystem: Google, Gmail, YouTube, Docs, etc. According to a 2011 Comscore analysis (one of the few direct breakdowns by browser), 87.1% of searches originating in Chrome used Google.

Seems like the article is greatly exaggerating that Brave has more access to user data than Google? Chrome transmits everything with long-lived identifiers.

Brave Search API has SOC 2 type II attestation from a three-month independent audit for security and privacy by Prescient Security. None of the other supposedly private search engines have received similar audits. It seems to me that it would be trivial for any "private" search engine to fingerprint its users.

Brave's ads are opt-in, and the opt-in users of BAT are definitely in the minority. As the article mentions, Brave's ad matching is entirely on-device. When ads are shown and viewed, Brave's server receives simple confirmation of the fact using local differential privacy. I'm not personally aware that anyone has demonstrated Brave transmits "real-time attention tracking, cursor movement, dwell time."

I'm not aware that anyone has shown Brave's pings or telemetry contain identifiers, either. The code is open-source.
 
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With all due respect, unless the author on Cambridge Analytica can produce some verifiable information, I'm starting to assume that this "Brave Surveillance Machine" is little more than sensational clickbait. They admitted that the small-fry BAT advertising program is on-device without supporting any of the slanderous accusations.

I haven't been given even the faintest reason to believe that Brave is receiving more user data than Google. Absolutely ridiculous.

I could easily go write a sensational article on how, by default, Firefox does transmit more data than Brave, and with long-lived identifiers. This is entirely provable. Mozilla also collaborated with Meta on advertising technology just a few years ago. Most of their money comes directly from Google, and the default search engine is accordingly data-hungry Google. Sounds to me like the perfect recipe for conspiracy theories.
 
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It is likely that the article is exaggerating.
Firefox also has some telemetry by default.
I assume Brave does too, but that's just a guess.

What is certain is that while it is possible to eliminate Google (Chrome) surveillance with nickspaargeren lists:

GitHub - nickspaargaren/no-google: Completely block Google and its services

, I don't think a similar option is available for Brave, if of course such an option is needed.;)
 
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The more important thing to understand, is that when something is too good to be true, it is in some way a "bait". Wether it is Brave, Firefox, Opera and so on. Love it or curse it, put in it some very technical analysis and data, these guys need to take care of their business and will find some ways to make money with or without your consent, for the "protection and defence of privacy".
Naivity and the "Mr Knows it all" attitude are major weaknesses in humans.
 
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