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Brave, the false sensation of privacy

ebin.city

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Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#471

Post by jonathansampson »

freediver wrote: post #463
jonathansampson wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We drop the IP address. When needed, we'll convert it to a regional identifier (e.g. United States) so that we can have a count of how many users are in the US, UK, etc. I'm not sure where you saw 80 request; my network analysis post ( https://brave.com/popular-browsers-first-run/ ) shows Brave issuing 70 requests over a 10-minute period. Compare with Chrome (91 requests), Firefox (2,799 requests), Edge (367 requests…

>0 requests is not realistic, IMHO. When you launch a browser you want to make sure the user has a fresh local DB of known-malicious URLs (so you don't have to pipe each request through a look-up service, like Opera does) for client-side checking. You also want to make sure the client has an updated list of blocking rules for other types of content. There's quite a bit of setup needed when you launch a web browser. I…

A browser which doesn't update security features upon install, startup, and on a regular interval, is an unsafe browser. Such an application might be okay for a power-user who understands the risks, but not for a popular browser built for all types of users.

Telemetry is crucial to understanding how your product is used, as well as understanding what works and what doesn't. You cannot have one-on-one conversations with 30M+ users, which is how you learn, develop, and improve.

Brave needed to find privacy-respecting ways to achieve similar "conversational" insights. That's what we've done with Privacy-Preserving Product Analytics (https://www.brave.com/p3a/). P3A doesn't collect any user data, operates on a set of published "questions", and uses vague, range-based "answers". We also split up the requests to avoid developing a "fingerprint" from the answers.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#472

Post by jonathansampson »

x4e wrote: post #464
jonathansampson wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly! Check out the resource detailing our Ad Confirmation process at https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Security-and-pri... (it's a little old, but should be helpful). We leverage the Privacy Pass approach too, so reading https://www.petsymposium.org/2018/files/papers/issue3/popets... will also help understand our process. I hope this helps!

Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you sent, but isn't this just a way for the user to report that they viewed an add, not prove that they viewed it?

The cryptographic proofs are baked-into the confirmation and reporting process.

A sufficiently-capable attacker could conceivably trick the browser into thinking a native OS ad-notification was displayed, we do rely on the OS to inform us at this point (though preview versions of Brave do not have this dependency), but we have considered this as well.

The main threat here would be an attacker who attempts to automate the confirmation process, and potentially duplicate it across various VMs or OS instances. Fortunately, we've considered this too. For reasons I hope are obvious, I can't go into greater detail here.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#473

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

jonathansampson wrote: post #458
nieve wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the question was about the mechanism by which you viewing the ad is reported to Brave, not how the ad display was implemented. (A weird interpretation of "reported".)

Our Rewards server distributes virtual tokens to the instance of Brave (which has an associated Payment ID). These tokens can be exchanged when ad notifications have been viewed, and when other ad-related events occur. The tokens aren't tied to any user information.

Not to nitpick, but you still didn’t answer the question. I don’t think anyone is confused over the concept “view ad -> get token”. The parent comment was wondering how you determine an ad was viewed.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#474

Post by freediver »

jonathansampson wrote: post #471
freediver wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>0 requests is not realistic, IMHO. When you launch a browser you want to make sure the user has a fresh local DB of known-malicious URLs (so you don't have to pipe each request through a look-up service, like Opera does) for client-side checking. You also want to make sure the client has an updated list of blocking rules for other types of content. There's quite a bit of setup needed when you launch a web browser. I…

A browser which doesn't update security features upon install, startup, and on a regular interval, is an unsafe browser. Such an application might be okay for a power-user who understands the risks, but not for a popular browser built for all types of users. Telemetry is crucial to understanding how your product is used, as well as understanding what works and what doesn't. You cannot have one-on-one conversations wi…

The browser should be a secure app to begin with, without making any automatic external requests (if anything, theses can make it less secure). Almost every other application behaves in this way.

Besides, malicious URLs directory and content blocking hardly qualify as 'security’ features.

Telemetry can be useful, and totally feel free to have as much of it as you want, as long as users opt-in into it. You seem to be making a lot of choices on the behalf of the user, when your default setup has whopping 70 requests “home".

There is a way to achieve everything you want, and for a privacy respecting product (or one claiming to be one) these choices absolutely need to be users' and not yours (by the very definition of the term privacy)

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#475

Post by freediver »

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…

I am curious why doesn’t Brave block Google ads on its standard (default) ad-blocker settings?

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#476

Post by freediver »

jonathansampson wrote: post #459
mdale wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if a site made significant effort to have "non-malicious ads" I don't think brave would not block them with and put in their own. I.e Brave is bootstrapping on manipulation of the intent of the publisher. A cleaner aproch may be to approach publishers offer them a "better way" and decuple it from the browser marketing privacy / reduced ad load. Likewise standards bodies, NGOs and Gov agencies need to protect use…

Brave does not touch first-party ads; you can do all of the first-party advertising you like. Unfortunately, whether the third-party ads are malicious or not is not up to the publisher. The publisher is simply asked to add a bit of JavaScript to their page, and that's it. Brave doesn't inject ads onto webpages; so there is no scenario where you (as a publisher) would have our ads displayed on your page (unless you, y…

Nice video, but it almost completely misses the point:

Even if all ads on all websites were made in a privacy-respecting way, people would still use adblockers.

This is because people simply hate ads in their browser. It is because they make browsing experience miserable. They add bloat. They distract from the content. They add cognitive overhead. They slow down browsing. They are literally unwanted guests in our browsers.

So Brave’s model replaces one set of ads with another, basically achieving nothing to mitigate the problem itself - very existance of ads in the first place. What makes Brave’s ad model worse is that it offers people a monetary incentive for doing an activity (watch ads) that we know they are trying to avoid (by using a browser with an ad-blocker). So the very premise of this setup seems to be that people hate ads just because they are not privacy-respecting. But reality is that people normally simply do not want to be exposed to ads.

(btw the only ad based business model that would align all incentives is one in which users would be paying to see the ads)

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#477

Post by jonathansampson »

freediver wrote: post #474
jonathansampson wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A browser which doesn't update security features upon install, startup, and on a regular interval, is an unsafe browser. Such an application might be okay for a power-user who understands the risks, but not for a popular browser built for all types of users. Telemetry is crucial to understanding how your product is used, as well as understanding what works and what doesn't. You cannot have one-on-one conversations wi…

The browser should be a secure app to begin with, without making any automatic external requests (if anything, theses can make it less secure). Almost every other application behaves in this way. Besides, malicious URLs directory and content blocking hardly qualify as 'security’ features. Telemetry can be useful, and totally feel free to have as much of it as you want, as long as users opt-in into it. You seem to be…

The browser is secure "to begin with" because it is designed to adapt to the moving threat landscape of the Web. Attackers aren't static; we don't want to their targets to be static either. A browser that doesn't adapt rapidly, dies.

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#478

Post by jonathansampson »

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #473
jonathansampson wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our Rewards server distributes virtual tokens to the instance of Brave (which has an associated Payment ID). These tokens can be exchanged when ad notifications have been viewed, and when other ad-related events occur. The tokens aren't tied to any user information.

Not to nitpick, but you still didn’t answer the question. I don’t think anyone is confused over the concept “view ad -> get token”. The parent comment was wondering how you determine an ad was viewed.

Apologies, I thought I did address that. Here's a deep-link to the process of "confirmation," which means a user has viewed an ad: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Security-and-pri....

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#479

Post by freediver »

jonathansampson wrote: post #477
freediver wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser should be a secure app to begin with, without making any automatic external requests (if anything, theses can make it less secure). Almost every other application behaves in this way. Besides, malicious URLs directory and content blocking hardly qualify as 'security’ features. Telemetry can be useful, and totally feel free to have as much of it as you want, as long as users opt-in into it. You seem to be…

The browser is secure "to begin with" because it is designed to adapt to the moving threat landscape of the Web. Attackers aren't static; we don't want to their targets to be static either. A browser that doesn't adapt rapidly, dies.

This is what the automatic update mechanism is for (and which should be opt-in as well like an OS would do it).

Re: Brave, the false sensation of privacy

#480

Post by BrendanEich »

dblohm7 wrote: post #395
meibo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that there's a reason Brendan Eich doesn't work for Mozilla anymore, and it's not just layoffs due to dwindling userbases. Half of their board stepped down when he was about to be appointed. Decoupling software from the people behind it may be a good thing, but I don't want to support people that work against my interests.

> Half of their board stepped down when he was about to be appointed. You mean the same board that appointed him? Yes, a number of board members stepped down around that time, but a couple of those were coincidental timing.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10654651.
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