So I hear about the Brave Browser as an alternative for private browsing. I'm always looking for more private browsing options, especially ones that are simple enough to recommend to more people at #EncryptEverything and on the street. And the marketing sounds good, if you pair it with DuckDuckGo. However, the word "Blockchain" sticks out to me on their site, so I keep investigating.
Brave Browser is funded by and designed around a crypto-currency called "Basic Attention Token". And you can spend these tokens on sites you visit based on how long you are on the site or you can block them or give them more if you like. And they have a one-way function that can convert other crypto-currencies (and "fiat currency" which is a red flag term for me) to BAT. There is a hole in their site where they mention that they are building an advertiser system as well that isn't ready yet. So investigating further I see the BAT site talks about "Paying" into the Brave user's wallet by experiencing ads.
Here's my problem. They build a browser that is ostensibly for privacy. And they bake in a way to pay sites without seeing advertising using traceable crypto-currency that can identify you with a profile linked to your wallet. A unidirectional wallet that you can't draw out of and can get "Paid" in by seeing advertisements. Sites will be able to track which wallets are engaging with them and how much and advertisers can do that same. If I understand the blockchain, how wallets interact with sites and ads will be public knowledge as well. So you can directly track a user's browsing habits and the ads they see. All it takes is one site matching logins to wallets and all of that "Privacy" that the browser offers comes tumbling down. And I don't see anything in their documentation that will keep sites from correlating wallets with other identifiers. If you build a browser for "Privacy" and bake in a system that can track users, you are not building a private browser.
My conclusion is that this is not a privacy forward browser. This is a company trying to cash in on the crypto-currency boom and redefining how sites get paid by viewers. Changing the advertising paradigm is a valid and logical goal, one that I'd support. Crypto-currency is a problem in several ways, many of which Charlie Stross laid out years ago. Maybe Brave could be used as a private browser with the right combination of settings, but for now I'll keep using Firefox and DuckDuckGo.
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