The more I read through the Brave website the more it feels like this is actually vastly worse than the status quo.
All quotes are directly from the FAQ:
"We do not even have access to identifiable user data". Except for the "in-browser targeting engine" which has "substantially more information about the user's activity available to it than traditional tracking methods", which are stored in the browser and then exposed to advertisers "to maximize user, publisher and advertiser value."
"Each ad request is anonymous, and exposes only a small subset of the user's preferences and intent signals to prevent 'fingerprinting' the user by a possibly unique set of tags". Except that the only reason advertisers need to fingerprint the user is in order to collect enough information to decide which ads to serve to them, which is precisely what they'd be getting from Brave (and then some.) Great, that information is stored in the browser instead of the cloud, and only subsets of it are exposed to the advertisers for each request -- but that doesn't benefit the end user at all. It benefits Brave, by maintaining their middleman position as the de facto controller of which advertisers gets access to that data.
"We block trackers, that’s a big win compared to the status quo." It is! For Brave. Because the whole browser is now an ad tracker. Ok, the data is keyed to a UUID instead of a name or other "personally identifiable information". How does that benefit the end user? In no way at all.
Throughout the site is repeated handwaving about how nothing is sent in the clear, they don't even have the encryption keys, nothing is personally identifiable, but none of that matters, because the end result is the same. It's still an ad tracker designed to enable targeted advertising. But with much, much more data to work with than in existing browsers. Offloading the tracking work into the client instead of doing it server-side is just misdirection.
And how about those content creators? "Our goal is to make better revenue for all publishers," they say, but I see no explanation of how stripping out websites' individual ad sales and replacing them with Brave's benefits the publishers. Congratulations! Brave's "revenue sharing" program means your ad space is worth 55% of what it used to be! [1] Oh, don't worry, they'll get around to building a micropayments scheme someday, which they'll also take a share of.
This is just. I mean. Gah. Flames. On the side of my face.
[1] (I can't find that figure on their site, but it's quoted here: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/267089/new-bro... "...revenue derived by selling ads through Brave will be split four ways: 15% each will be distributed to the user, to Sonobi and to Brave, with 55% allocated to publishers.")