Brave launches private search ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Brave launches private search ads

#151

Post by hunterb123 » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

orangeoxidation wrote: post #28

Proven wrote: post #2

Can Brave ad blocker block Brave ads?

It does not. I find the wild, anti-competitive cross product "synergy" the big tech companies are employing just as concerning as privacy violations. (E.g. Google search pushing Chrome and other services, Chrome sync logging users into YouTube, Android, Windows pushing One Drive, Apple music not paying the Apple store tax, Facebook harvesting WhatsApp data etc.) Brave joining those practices leaves an ugly taste.

You are wrong, the built-in ad blocker does block first party ads in aggressive mode or if you manually add a rule.

Re: Brave launches private search ads

#152

Post by satvikpendem » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

logicalmonster wrote: post #146

satvikpendem wrote: post #74

After all the Brave controversies [0] I'm not sure why anyone uses Brave anymore. They took creators' money while ostensibly "collecting" it for them, and they inserted their own affiliate links when you visited certain sites. It's just shady behavior all around. I mean, when you have your own "Controversies" section on Wikipedia, you know there's something wrong. Especially with Manifest v3 looming which would kill…

> After all the Brave controversies "Brave's controversies" are not really about Brave. Brave as a company is not above criticism and should be harshly gone after for their mistakes when they do anything less than perfect with regards to privacy or anything else. I think they've done over 90% of things right, but have screwed up a small portion of the complicated stuff (new browser, new online advertising models, and…

I don't care about Eich himself, I view creators as separate from their creations, so I'm surely not who you're talking about. I would rather that people use a non Chromium browser over a Chromium one, and honestly, Chromium itself is less shady than Brave due to the shady behavior I mentioned. I mean, man in the middle attacking your own browser, really?

Re: Brave launches private search ads

#153

Post by hosteur » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

INeedMoreRam wrote: post #48

mberning wrote: post #32

I have been enjoying Kagi. Don’t mind the $10 per month to support something that caters to me rather than advertisers.

Did you create a new “bogus”email address when you signed up for their service to hide your identity? Or were you okay with giving them your real email address? I feel uncomfortable potentially having my searches linked to my real email and/or name.

Never mind the email address. If you pay them they have your real identity.

This is really what prevents me from using them. Although the search does seem to be superb.

Re: Brave launches private search ads

#154

Post by Faint » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

Would you trust Google's ( or other search provider's) ads more, if they had a separately browsable "classifieds" site, not unlike Craigslist, that the search ads would be search results from (reach modified by how much the ads were paid with, ofc.). Anyway, when you saw an add, you could click through it like now, or click to browse a relevant section of the classifieds site. Which would also work as a catalog of all paid and also unpaid ads the search provider carried?

Re: Brave launches private search ads

#155

Post by fanso99 » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

INeedMoreRam wrote: post #75

musk_micropenis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> either you allow Brave to leak your info to advertisers Can you expand on this? According to the article the ads are privacy-preserving but I'm open to hearing otherwise. There's not a lot of detail in the article.

Assuming we can trust Brave, the article clearly states: "Brave Search only uses your search query, country, and device type to show you ads, and does not keep any kind of profile of your searches." My question to somebody who understands this more than me, by collecting query, country, device type, is that enough info to identify users? Doesn't Brave automatically get User Agent strings, too?

Unless they mean something non-conventional, a search query, country, and device type are not enough to do any fingerprinting reliably. Some would argue that if you live in a very small country (like Vatican City) and you are the only user who searches for some obscure query on a daily basis then that's enough to identify you. But on a global scale of a search engine - no, not enough.

Re: Brave launches private search ads

#156

Post by autoexec » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

dymk wrote: post #114

kevinventullo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If search engines were considered important enough to be a public utility, one could be funded by taxpayer dollars. Now of course, search results can be heavily politicized, but I suppose the same is true of which books a library decides to carry.

Search engines are important, but they’re funded quite well with ads, so why would anybody go through the effort to make it a public utility?

So that search engines work.

Google search has been crippled by ads. Sometimes people just want nice stuff and a search engine that wasn't designed to mislead (https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/20/9768350/google-ads-searc...) and where the amount of money paid doesn't dictate what is easy to find would be a great asset to everybody. No company has risen to give us a powerful search engine that isn't also a cesspool of marketing bullshit so it would be reasonable for people to seek an option that serves the interests of the public.

Re: Brave launches private search ads

#157

Post by princevegeta89 » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

Proven wrote: post #2

Can Brave ad blocker block Brave ads?

Maybe, but I would not trust it. Just install uBlock Origin and you're free to completely turn off "Brave Shields" or whatever it is called.

Re: Brave launches private search ads

#158

Post by therealmarv » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 10:04 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #74

After all the Brave controversies [0] I'm not sure why anyone uses Brave anymore. They took creators' money while ostensibly "collecting" it for them, and they inserted their own affiliate links when you visited certain sites. It's just shady behavior all around. I mean, when you have your own "Controversies" section on Wikipedia, you know there's something wrong. Especially with Manifest v3 looming which would kill…

- Brave blocks you more against Fingerprinting than Firefox with uBlock. https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

- Brave uses Chromium and uses better isolation and sandbox than Firefox. Especially on Android.

- Brave has Adblock built-in natively. It's written in Rust, so Manifest v3 will not affect it. https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

- Brave is profitable on itself and not dependent on search engines money like Firefox.

Not saying it's the best but I decided against Firefox because the technical and financial foundation looks better on Brave for me.

Re: Brave launches private search ads

#159

Post by princevegeta89 » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

p0pcult wrote: post #16

rabuse wrote: post #12

Everything free, becomes ad-infested. Nothing is free, and it's really annoying seeing company after company make empty promises about privacy and "being different", then switching up when their investors start breathing down their necks. Just be honest from the start.

At this point, it's not just free things that are becoming infested.

Agreed. Outside software, there's a growing plague as well.

- Buying an $1200+ iPhone that doesn't come with an adapter.

- BMW charging you $10+ bucks per month to turn on seat heaters that came with your already expensive car

- Mercedes 0-60mph acceleration booster "unlock fee" for $1200/year

- Tesla woes with frequent "upgrades" locked behind paywalls.

- The ironic micro-transactions in Mobile games. When summed up, they are only "macro" with millions of bucks coming in every day. This has infested gaming outside Mobile as well. I'm not ever gonna touch console gaming again.

Re: Brave launches private search ads

#160

Post by ipaddr » Thu, Dec 01, 2022, 10:06 PM UTC

AlotOfReading wrote: post #128

yucky wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I don't see how they increase the free and open exchange of information on the web. I think I can help explain. Almost all search engine users (~95%+) only scan the first 10-20 results on a query, and those results are dominated by sites that have the budget to spend on SEO. Buying ads gives other voices a chance to break through. Depending on the niche it can be far more expensive to be on the first page of se…

In actual practice those ad slots usually end up dominated by companies looking to take advantage of uninformed consumers (e.g. [1]). Sponsored search slots also introduce the perverse incentive of forcing people to pay for ads on their own results so that potential customers don't get stolen away by competitors' ads. Let's give a more real-world example, like say a search for 'fine dining restaurants' in Oakland. We…

Your expectations may not match reality. The target market for fine dining are not the type of people looking through search results on the internet for suggestions for dining. They will hear about through conversation or be introduced through a private network. If you have to advertise you already are attracting the wrong crowd.