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Brave, the false sensation of privacy

ebin.city

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Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#371

Post by gentleman11 »

_fnhr wrote: post #234
wmitty wrote: post #16

> Their adblocker is just a fork of uBlock Origin, This does not appear to be true. Here is the github repo for their open source adblock engine written in rust: https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust Here is a (somewhat dated) article describing it by the authors: https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/ > Google will take decisions that benefit their advertisement business, like making impossible to use ad…

There are more lies in that article. This one for example is so often repeated but untrue: > Rewards is their shitty program that will replace ads displayed on websites with their own. Brave doesn't replace ads with their own. Brave ads are displayed as desktop pop-ups. They can also be easily disabled (which, surprise, the author doesn't mention because of his bias). And the idea behind Brave ads is to give you toke…

The long term play might be that, but they would probably never get the market share to exploit it fully

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#372

Post by gentleman11 »

ehutch79 wrote: post #361
jonathansampson wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A regional catalog is downloaded routinely. The only "data" going out is your region (e.g. the United States). This returns a protobuf catalog of ads for your region. Your device privately studies this catalog for relevant entries. When an ad is shown, it's presented as a native notification on the OS. This means the user sees a title (text), and a body (text). Screenshots of these notifications are on https://brave.…

How does it report the ad was viewed?

and how do they prevent users from faking ad views to accumulate bat?

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#373

Post by gentleman11 »

pmurt7 wrote: post #334
ehutch79 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's fetching ads, it has to 100% be sending some data to someone, who is likely able to correlate it and track you. It doesn't take much.

The entire ad catalog is sent on your machine and some ad engine running inside the browser decides which ads to show you. It's funny seeing all these folks nitpicking at Brave but who are fine using Google or Microsoft every day

Do you have to download the chosen ad or is it already on your system? If you selectively downloaded ads, your ip address could give you away and you get a floc like situation

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#374

Post by mthoms »

gonehome wrote: post #341
mattalex wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't really get how brave is supposed to work: You watch significantly fewer ads than before, these ads are then supplied to whoever you yourself engage with. That seems like watching these fewer ads directly on the site, just with a few hoops in between. The difference is that now you watch fewer ads in total, and you have the Brave-browser as an inbetween, which also somehow has to survive. This means that…

I think the idea is this: - Most people won't paypal/patreon/send money directly - The current system uses ads as a shorthand for attention. If you're able to get attention you get more ad traction and more money. - Ads suck and are a corrupting influence on everything, if there was a way to directly award attention without ads that would be better. - Brave replaces ads by tracking attention directly and attempting t…

You seem to have missed a critical point: The “attention tracking” Brave does stays completely on device.

The browser is sent a list of ads, and the browser decides which ads to serve based on its metrics. Brave doesn’t see this data and the user can choose to participate or not.

There are no easy answers, but this is an interesting model and a reasonable compromise for many.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#375

Post by annoyingnoob »

jonathansampson wrote: post #326
annoyingnoob wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Brave's approach to funding is at odds with privacy. The concept of warming up to ads to get paid is capitulating to the advertising industry. While I did not appreciate the tone of the article, there are some valid points there. Brave may be better than Chrome but there are still better options. It might be better to get a common cold virus than it is to get covid-19, but I'd still rather not get any virus…

"Brave's approach to funding is at odds with privacy." Elaborate, please. Brave's ad model is built for privacy and security. User's must first opt-in. Your data remains on your device. Ad catalogs are downloaded and reviewed locally. You are rewarded when you see an ad notification. I repeat, rewards are granted when your attention has been spent; no clicks necessary. I discussed the model further in this recent 5-m…

Brave is its own ad network and offers targeting to over 200 IAB categories. I don't agree that profiling my demographics and offering them up for sale is protecting my privacy, even if that does not include PII.

If I want to skip out on Brave Ads then I don't really need the Brave browser.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#376

Post by jaywalk »

tialaramex wrote: post #350
jaywalk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way I can think of that working is if the provider is intercepting DNS requests for popular speed tests to redirect to an internally-hosted version that would be faster. Otherwise, I can't think of any realistic way DNS settings can affect actual throughput.

So, suppose I'm Huge Video Streaming Corp X, and I get a DNS request asking me for the address of my servers. Well I have over a thousand servers around the globe, which one do you need? Any of them would work, but you likely want the fast nearby one, right? So I can try to guess based on the IP address the query came from... I know the best answer for a Comcast DNS server in New York is the server I physically insta…

That's not what I meant by "actual throughput." The fact that a download is slower from a server halfway around the world versus one in the same datacenter where my ISP has a peering agreement near me isn't because my connection slows down when I'm hitting the far away server.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#377

Post by jaywalk »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #344
jaywalk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way I can think of that working is if the provider is intercepting DNS requests for popular speed tests to redirect to an internally-hosted version that would be faster. Otherwise, I can't think of any realistic way DNS settings can affect actual throughput.

If the ISP is checking for DNS lookup of speed test websites, then allocating higher bandwidth to the connection for a brief period of time? Or, somehow more cynically, the ISP makes money from selling the data collected from DNS, so punishes people who use a different DNS provider. (DNS is plaintext-by-default, so I don't quite see how this would work, but it's possible.) Or perhaps the system uses DNS lookups as a…

Your first example would be dead simple to detect and take advantage of to get those boosted speeds all the time. Your other two examples are a bit wild.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#378

Post by paco3346 »

fallat wrote: post #168
wmitty wrote: post #16

> Their adblocker is just a fork of uBlock Origin, This does not appear to be true. Here is the github repo for their open source adblock engine written in rust: https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust Here is a (somewhat dated) article describing it by the authors: https://brave.com/improved-ad-blocker-performance/ > Google will take decisions that benefit their advertisement business, like making impossible to use ad…

Why not just use Ungoogled-Chromium?

I switched because Google removed the ability to log in and sync settings, history, password, etc. (I realize that in this case I'm directly giving Google my data) but it was a super nice feature.

Brave's Sync v2 works decently well.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#379

Post by jonathansampson »

ehutch79 wrote: post #361
jonathansampson wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A regional catalog is downloaded routinely. The only "data" going out is your region (e.g. the United States). This returns a protobuf catalog of ads for your region. Your device privately studies this catalog for relevant entries. When an ad is shown, it's presented as a native notification on the OS. This means the user sees a title (text), and a body (text). Screenshots of these notifications are on https://brave.…

How does it report the ad was viewed?

When the notification pops on screen, you are granted the rewards. If your OS is not able to show the notification (due to Focus Assist, DND, or some other reason) then you are not rewarded (a future update to Brave will let users control visibility from within the browser entirely).

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#380

Post by tk75x »

tialaramex wrote: post #350
jaywalk wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way I can think of that working is if the provider is intercepting DNS requests for popular speed tests to redirect to an internally-hosted version that would be faster. Otherwise, I can't think of any realistic way DNS settings can affect actual throughput.

So, suppose I'm Huge Video Streaming Corp X, and I get a DNS request asking me for the address of my servers. Well I have over a thousand servers around the globe, which one do you need? Any of them would work, but you likely want the fast nearby one, right? So I can try to guess based on the IP address the query came from... I know the best answer for a Comcast DNS server in New York is the server I physically insta…

This explanation makes a lot of sense. It also has a slight feeling of Hanlon's Razor, although there isn't necessarily incompetence involved (unless you count the technology's inability to find the absolute fastest/closest server [for whatever reason] as incompetence).
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