"The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option..."
How my viewpoint has shifted over the years. 10-20 years ago this would have instantly turned me off, but now this is the most exciting line in the entire thing to me. As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.
@Brave team, who I rather expect will be reading this, I can't believe that Cliqz doing tracking on me to improve its results for free will be in my interests if it's free. But if I'm a paying customer, you might be able to convince me that you're doing some semi-invasive tracking but not actually selling it to anyone, because it wouldn't be worth losing me as a customer.
I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Been waiting for DDG to do it but last I knew there's still no option there.
Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. It will always be more profitable to track users, except in cases like DDG or Brave that stake their reputation on privacy. For instance, I pay for groceries, yet my grocery store tracks my purchases and sells that information. We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. Government regulation is needed.
It is necessary, but not sufficient. But you are correct. This is part of why I phrased this in terms of my belief, rather than absolute truth. There's no way to convince me you aren't tracking if it's free. If it is not free, and significantly larger in magnitude than the virtue of tracking, then you at least stand a chance of convincing me.
Grocery stores track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, a fairly direct benefit that is difficult to "compete" with as a consumer. Internet companies use it to sell you ads, which is pretty much just about the money, barring exciting conspiracy theories. We can put a decent number on how much money that is, and it really isn't that much money. Facebook makes on the order of $20-40 per year in revenue from a user [1], and the nature of the business is they do better per user than most other people. For something like Cliqz we could easily be "competing" with a revenue of less than $1/year/user, at which point the business case of that extra dollar vs. the catastrophic loss in business if they get caught is a plausible set of incentives I can believe for them to not do it. Not proof, but plausible.
> We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy.
You don't get from your first point to here.
The cause of the market failure is that once you give your data to someone, you can't know what they do with it. The solution is for them to never have it in the first place.
This has technical solutions. Your data stays on your device, not their servers, or if it is on their servers then it's encrypted. Don't do anything client-server that could be federated or P2P etc. Publish the source code.
This needs a business model. But "you pay money to fund development and then get software including source code that you run on your device" is a business model. If people want this they can have it. Go stuff cash into some open source projects by subscribing to their Patreon or Substack or whatever people are using now, and then use them.
The alternative doesn't actually solve the problem. You give your data to Google, the government says Google can't do X with it, but you still have no way to verify that they're not doing X because once they have your data, X happens entirely at Google where you have no way of observing it.
It also fails to protect against covert defections by both parties where the government gets all your data in exchange for looking the other way while the corporation does whatever they want with it too. You need to be able to prove that it's not happening, or it is.
Hopefully not the kind of regulation that puts a breaking burden on companies like Brave, while letting big tech do whatever they want after a token fine.
Agreed. Just look all other paid software, computer services, and even computing machines.
Microsoft charges you for a Windows license and still tracks you. I have little doubt Adobe, et al, are selling your data. Amazon surely makes money when I buy something from their site, but they track me anyway. Etc, etc.
We already have enough regulations and we still have so much problems. For one thing, it is selective enforcement. Secondly, the penalty is peanut. If penalty is a percentage of total revenue, it will change the behavior of the executive of the tech giant. Add some jail time for repeating offenders is a good idea too.
Lastly, the reason why regulations don’t work is regulations is written by lobbyists here in the US. Guess who these lobbyists represented?
The grocery store sells everything I buy to who, and is that information personally identifying? This seems insane that me buying a brand of toothpaste could be fed back into Google for more surveillance, but here we are.
Not sure I follow your logic. Targeted ads are profitable because consumers continue to use services that track and then target them.
If consumers didn't use these services because of such behavior, it would no longer be profitable to do so.
It's not the job of the market to protect your privacy, that's your job. Don't use a search engine that tracks you if you're worried about being tracked. It really is that simple.
As for guarantees about not being tracked, that's agreed upon in the ToS – so if the ToS says "we can track you however you want" (e.g. Googles) then don't use it. If it says "we won't track you" (DDG's) then do.
Depends on the goal of the organization, really. For organizations that follow the current business dogma (maximize short-term profit/increase shareholder value) then yes, they always have an incentive to screw over whomever they can.
But that's not how everybody thinks. The Craigslist leaders, for example. From 2006: "She recounts how UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn’t, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this). 'That definitely is not part of the equation,' he said, according to MediaPost. 'It’s not part of the goal.'" [1]
I do agree that privacy regulation is necessary to set a floor, though. Since our current system over-rewards juicing short-term metrics, we have to compensate by blocking the worst of the exploitative behaviors.
There was no tracking on Cliqz, nor it will be any in Brave. To know more about the underlying tech of Cliqz there are interesting posts at https://0x65.dev, some of them covering how signals are collected, data, but no tracking.
I did work at Cliqz and now I work at Brave. I can tell for a fact, that all data was, is and will be, record-unlinkable. That means that no-one, not me, not the government, not the ad department can reconstruct a session with your activity. Again, there is no tracking, full anonymity, Brave would not do it any other way.
Brave buying Cliqz is the first corporate acquisition that's actually made me feel better about the acquirer, ever. I have no idea how to react to that. Keeping up the dev blog would probably make me start recommending Brave, where before I recommended against it.
Incidentally, do you know what's happening to the Cliqz browser?
100% this. There is a glass ceiling to the quality of a search engine if it's free; it starts with G.
The paid option hasn't been explored yet, and for good reason I think: in principle, you need training data for it to be any good. And, again in principle, the only way to amass user data is for the service to be free, leveraging that to sharpen the tool.
So in principle, I reckon this is doomed to fail. But I might be wrong. I HOPE I'm wrong. And that's enough.
Personally, I don't have a problem with a service using aggregated usage data to improve their algorithms, even if that is technically "tracking" me. It's the selling of personalized segment data that bothers me.
What kind of training are the users providing that makes G better? I thought their secret was that they have better infrastructure to crawl and organize information?
I don't see how a paid search engine has a disadvantage here.
One possible upside is the Metafilter principle: If you charge $5, you get a higher quality signal by excluding a lot of chaff. The probability that your search engine user is human gets much closer to 1, and you save a lot (but not all) of the anti-abuse effort. This gives you better signal on which websites are interesting, so you need possibly orders of magnitude less data to do a good job.
Back in the day (late 90s) there was a company called Copernic that had a good search engine with a REALLY good desktop client. I remember being able to do all sort of filters, sorting and crazy searches. IIRC It was paid, and it was really way ahead of the simple search operations you can even currently do with Google (actually, Google has constantly removed search abilities as time goes by, like for example, anyone remember when Google Search could show tweeter search results? or that you could "block" domains from search results)
Honestly, there should be some sort of never-forget meme about Google removing the + operator when they started up their stupid social network that failed and then never put it back >:(
Just checked wikipedia, and it seems it'll be ten years ago this June that google stole + and forced quoting upon us for pure vanity reasons.
I would not get too excited until you read the agreement they present you with. If you are a paying customer and they make promises, such as privacy-related ones, then those could theoretically be enforceable, with quantifiable damages at least equal to what you have paid. Will they accept that potential liability. Google won't. If Brave breaks their privacy promises to millions of paying end users, will they try to prevent the possibility of class-actions when potentially hundreds, maybe thousands or more of them all simultaneously "ask for their money back". Does paying by itself magically transform empty promises into kept ones What if the promisor can break the promise and keep the payments.
My views similarly changed on email. It would have been inconceivable for me to pay for email 10 years ago. Now I'm happy to pay for a service that does the basics well, is primarily considering my interests, and will have competent customer service if something goes wrong.
I've really 180'd on this over the past two years. I've always loved business models that allowed free access, but now I'm very much focused on a business models that are sustainable, and without relying on being able to sell my data to keep the lights on. A service I can pay for access, in a sustainable business arrangement, is my new preferred model.
What if it's less profitable to run a paid search engine? Will they run both free/paid side-by-side? And how can one be certain they won't profit off the query data on the backend anyways?
Is there any reason I should think Brave won't prioritize profit motives first in 5, 10 years when investors or markets expect returns?
I do think that fewer things need to be free. But there’s no reason to believe that free means we must lose our privacy.
OTA television, for example, had been providing decades worth of extremely expensive programming for free. And this lost us absolutely no privacy.
There is no reason that ads have to invade our privacy. They can go back to targeting based on broad geographical and age demographics.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say the government passes a law that says that ads cannot be based on any factors more privacy invasive than your zip code and 10 year age range. It’s not like companies would stop paying for ads. They would pay less, but probably still enough to maintain free services, like Google did in its initial days.
there's also lots of smaller niche platforms/services that don't, sometimes even funded exclusively by donations. I think the size of the organization has a lot to do with the likelihood that your data is getting harvested as well.
give me the option to block certain sites from results and prioritize others, I would pay a monthly fee just for that level of customization. I hate searching to download something and only finding spam in the top 5 results.
I'm convinced that it's possible to build a better search engine than Google by using community-influenced results, rather than try to do magic.
I'd definitely pay for a search engine where we can collectively downvote to hell any SEO spam. That would be the only way to incentivize sites to provide actual quality rather than cheating the algorithms.
> As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.
Paid is still centralized. Decentralization isn't an answer, because people make their own decisions and a collective decision contains a lot of power. The only way to achieve true decentralization is to eliminate communication entirely. I believe it is referred to "Babel's tower". Centralization means we have no freedom and no privacy. With decentralization, 51% could conspire to murder the 49%. That experiment, taken after a few iterations, would quickly turn us extinct.
The idea is interesting. My view on the economics side is that the flaw is that this is a for profit company trying something new to make more profit. There's nothing wrong with that except that what they are selling is a commodity (bing, google, duck duck go, ..).
So, that doesn't sound like a sound plan. In fact it sounds a lot like everything Mozilla tried and failed to make money with in the last few years. Maybe users will pay for X .... nope they won't pay for X either. Ironically, Mozilla's main business remains reselling Google's search.
What's Brave's business model at this point? I'm assuming that the attention token business is at this point not really delivering substantial revenue.
Anyway, a couple of weaknesses here with both these business models (search and BAT):
- They are tied to Brave the browser, which while popular has a tiny market share. So, both solutions are cut off from the vast majority of users, including the fraction of a percent likely to be an early adopter of this (i.e. by actually paying). Fractions of fractions don't add up to a whole lot of revenue.
- That browser happens to be built by Google and also depended upon by Apple & Microsoft (i.e. Chromium). Between those three, they control access to most of the users via their apps stores and operating systems. They also control the main contenders Cliqz is supposed to compete with: Google, Bing & DDG (which is Bing). That sounds like an uncomfortable place to be as a would be competitor. Also, there's the Apple and Google tax to worry about with any kind of revenue: Brave users putting more cash in the coffers of Apple and Google basically.
- Users might pay for quality. That raises the question how you will get that. DDG is popular but a key reason for people to not use it remains that sometimes they just aren't good enough. And it's basically Bing, which depends on MS putting loads of cash and resources in it. I found myself reaching for Google a lot in the half year I used it until ultimately I decided that I did not have time for too many fruitless searches where I wasted time before ending up finding what I needed on Google. I reverted back to Google. And that's not because I enjoy being tracked or in their clutches: they are just that good.
- Brave as a walled garden for exclusive paid features does not make sense: it's too small. Both BAT and search as commercially offered features would have more users (and thus paying users) if they weren't tied to Brave the browser. IMHO both would actually need to be structured under a non profit organization for long term success (for users, not for Brave).
have you heard of greed? Do you think they care about loosing customers in that scenario? Where will they go? Dont be soo naive... they might start with honest and clean intentions but that will most likely change, or the pople running the company will change, people are soo easily corupted, especialy in a world filled with vice
Consider that it’s not just the changing times but also your own changing economic situation. Would you have had a spare $20/month foe a search engine subscription as a 16 year old? I sure had better uses for my money back then than something like this, privacy be damned.
i would probably just switch to bing or duckduckgo (aka bing) at this point. google used to be unparalleled in finding what you're actually looking for but their search results have steadily been getting worse.
In my understanding what Cliqz did, at least in the beginning, was to buy clickstream data and then build an index on top of that. So in a sense they just scraped Googles' search index, as almost all users rely on Google for finding stuff on the web. The clickstream data gives you both the search query and the website(s) users visit after searching, so it's pretty easy to build a search index from that, at least for popular searches (it might be more difficult for the long tail of search queries).
A lot of the clickstream data you can buy comes from browser extensions btw, and often gets collected without users knowing about it (looking at you, "Web of Trust"). I think their reliance on such data was the reason Cliqz acquired Ghostery, which also collects a copious amount of "anonymous" data from its users. On one hand it's a neat idea since you're basically standing on Googles' shoulders, on the other hand it's at least questionable for a "privacy-first" company as the generation of the search index is based on personal data mined from (often unwitting) users.
That said I don't know how their system evolved, so maybe today they have another way to build their index.
I work at Ghostery. Yes, Cliqz bought Ghostery for the Human Web data, since we have so many more users than Cliqz ever did. What gives you the impression that any data we are collecting is not appropriately anonymous?
The Ghostery extension is open source, so feel free to link to anything in the code that looks suspect to you
I'm not saying it's not anonymous, just that it's impossible to assert the anonymity.
Also, I saw a lot of "anonymous" clickstream data offered by other companies, which was often trivial to de-anonymize. We did a DEF CON 25 talk about it, just google "Dark Data DEF CON 25". Robustly anonymizing high-dimensional data like user clickstreams is practically impossible, and often knowing a combination of 4-7 websites a user regularly visits is enough to identify him/her in a pool of millions of users (see the talk for details), so I'm highly doubtful about any company that claims it can robustly anonymize such data. If you're confident your data is anonymous why not release a large sample and have researchers look at it?
So while I'm not saying Ghostery is also doing that I don't have a lot of good faith in these data collection practices in general (also, I think before Cliqz acquired Ghostery it collected a lot of data like cookies from the users). Again, it's a smart way to collect data but I wouldn't call it very privacy-friendly.
There is a better way to service users interests; initially it was "keywords" - but now it can be more structured;
"I want to learn [topic]" and the response may be a step-by-step how-to on how to learn [topic]
TBH this was a subject addressed on NPR this morning.. People staying at home are talking about the old infra of edu where people cant be in person - but nobody is talking about the opportunity on changing the structure of learning at all - there should be seen the opportunity on changing the way in which we learn something.
Brave has a long way to go to build real trust. Too many reckless stuff: hijacking links, suspicious url-rewriting, crypto-token stunts, forgetting to communicate with users about serious privacy leaks with their faulty TOR window... also it looks like they care about privacy only in their PR brochures.
On one browser installation I stopped getting payouts, reached out to them via reddit (like they asked for) and provided all the information they asked for: ghosted.
I'm also a publisher, for weeks now I can't login and it seems like I'm not getting payouts anymore either. Never got any mail about it. Sent them an email about it February 23rd, no answer so far.
If I'd have to guess, the one client somehow got blacklisted maybe because I used too many Brave installations and they think they're fraudulent? (Though I only used like 5, Brave & Brave Beta each on a desktop & laptop, then on another desktop just one installation. Also, I still get payouts for the other installations.) Or it's just another one of the bugs that eats payouts and users' BATs.
Publisher account I even have less of an idea, it's totally fine, teen-rated gaming websites with a couple of thousand organic (search traffic) uniques/month. I did sent BAT from my unconnected Browsers (you only can connect a maximum of 4 browsers to a wallet, ever) to my site to tip myself.
As far as I know that isn't against the TOS either (even makes them more money because they douple dip).
But, even if they don't suspend you without any notice, it's completely non-transparent as a publisher too.
You get zero statistics, just a bundled payout each month. I'd never use them like this as a publisher for bigger sites, pretty sure I mailed them about that too in the past and also did not get any reply.
That's a feature, not a bug. The point of the Brave ad blocker is to (optionally) replace unethical ads with ethical ones so you can compensate the content creators you browse. How is this scummy?
The Tor leak was already fixed in Brave Nightly when independently discovered. We were fixing as part of a HackerOne bug report, which per standard practice is not disclosed until patched in all releases. The mistake there was not forgetting to disclose, it was not airlifting the fix into Brave Stable and intermediate releases right away. We have already made process fixes; automated network leak testing is the biggest one.
If you don't like crypto-tokens, don't use them. They're optional in Brave. They have no privacy impact.
Cliqz’s Human Web used servers from FoxyProxy to remove IP address info. Will you continue to partner with FoxyProxy (as a matter of outsourcing the “trust us, we’re not tracking your IP”) component? If not FoxyProxy, then who — this 3rd party companies’ reputation matters.
Agreed. I just don’t see why I should not continue to use Firefox, Multi-Account Containers, and DuckDuckGo, and just use Tor Browser if I want to use TOR.
The whole crypto thing in Brave especially rubs me the wrong way, it feels like a Ponzi scheme.
It’s chrome with extra features, and not owned by Google. You don’t have to participate in their crypto nonsense, and you don’t have to use their TOR browser
All browsers allow those social widgets by default, because blocking them breaks too many pages. Brave is not alone in this regard. We're working on a better default that blocks but replaces with mock objects bundled with Brave's binary that activate the real widget on click. In the mean time, you can turn them off and risk broken pages via "Social media blocking" settings.
Also doesn't help that Brave's CEO is a right wing guy (asked to leave Mozilla because of his radical comments) and a COVID conspiracy theorist "masks don't do anything"
I'm not sure what the relevance of it either way. Even though he left Mozilla due to his public opposition to marriage-equality for same-sex couples, to connect that with his current company seems like a stretch.
And even being an anti-masker in the COVID19 context, however misguided that might be, isn't really related to the browser's functionality.
The thing is that Cliqz was "majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media" [1], and that "The deal, terms undisclosed, makes Cliqz owner Hubert Burda Media a Brave shareholder." [2]
Doesn't Hubert Burda Media have a interest in removing ad-blocking technologies from the web? Couldn't partnering with Brave get them into a privileged position where they are capable of displaying ads and build user profiles?
If so that makes sense as Brave is happy to show you "ethical ads” instead of the ads already on a page if you so choose and reward you and the original content creator(maybe) with their very own funny money.
When you sign up as a BAT publisher, you choose what currency to get paid in. It's just as easy to pick USD, and then it will auto-convert the BAT to dollars, and you would hardly even know it involves crypto. It's not some ponzi scheme.
Excited that Brave is playing a pioneering role here with leveraging cryptocurrencies and distributed tech (including Web3) who's time, it looks like, will come. It helps that a Browser is close to a perfect environment from which to challenge the incumbents heavily dependent on ad revenues.
> Brave Search's index there will be informed the activities of participating Brave users, in terms of the URLs they search for or click on, and adjacent web resources that don't require extensive crawling.
This is quite similar to Amazon's now-defunct A9.com which, iirc, had some form of hybrid search engine that was built on search / ad results from Google and the data Amazon collected via the Alexa toolbar.
> The Brave Search team has written a paper explaining its use of the term, titled "GOGGLES: Democracy dies in darkness, and so does the Web." The browser upstart aims to replace the tyranny of Google's inscrutable, authoritative index with a multiverse of indices defined by anyone with the inclination to do so.
Again, very similar to WAIS. Has Eich been speaking to Brewster Kahle? :)
> Brave Search's index there will be informed the activities of participating Brave users, in terms of the URLs they search for or click on, and adjacent web resources that don't require extensive crawling.
> Brave also envisions users taking a more active role in their search results through a filtering mechanism.
"It allows different groups to run their own sort of Turing complete filter rules, sort of like ad blocking rules in the search service and not in the browser, to have a community moderated view of the global index," he [Brendan Eich, Brave founder] explained. "It's called 'Goggles.'"
Shameless plug, but I've been working on a project [0] that does exactly this. Currently it just has a few filters I've created for myself and only supports web search (and a few !bang like re-directs), but I'm working on implementing user accounts that will be able to create their own filters.
I was pretty sure that it could be done in Google with operators in the search box (going back a few years), but I don't use Google any more and one reason I stopped was that it kept incrementally degrading the ability to refine individual searches manually. Anyhow, I just did a DDG search and came across this [1], which looks interesting for your use case (although that Pinterest is mentioned is a coincidence). I've not tried it out, so I can't recommend, comment or anything.
"The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option..."
This is the future of services on the internet. The 'cult of free' should die off as people realize they don't want to be bought and sold like digital cattle.
payment in Basic Attention Token... isn't that exactly how the Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc advertising business models work.
BAT is basically a reward for watching adds right?
I like the idea of paying my content producers directly better, see for example https://coil.com. Cut out the middleman
I have been developing a simple mantra: Pay for stuff I use.
Mostly software so far.
As far as “free stuff” provided by the government, I feel there is a baseline that a government should provide, as that should be their purpose. Where that line is, and what services are provided is a source of intense debate.
“Pay for stuff I use” is a great starting point, but hardly a hard and fast rule.
Readit News
How my viewpoint has shifted over the years. 10-20 years ago this would have instantly turned me off, but now this is the most exciting line in the entire thing to me. As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.
@Brave team, who I rather expect will be reading this, I can't believe that Cliqz doing tracking on me to improve its results for free will be in my interests if it's free. But if I'm a paying customer, you might be able to convince me that you're doing some semi-invasive tracking but not actually selling it to anyone, because it wouldn't be worth losing me as a customer.
I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Been waiting for DDG to do it but last I knew there's still no option there.
Grocery stores track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, a fairly direct benefit that is difficult to "compete" with as a consumer. Internet companies use it to sell you ads, which is pretty much just about the money, barring exciting conspiracy theories. We can put a decent number on how much money that is, and it really isn't that much money. Facebook makes on the order of $20-40 per year in revenue from a user [1], and the nature of the business is they do better per user than most other people. For something like Cliqz we could easily be "competing" with a revenue of less than $1/year/user, at which point the business case of that extra dollar vs. the catastrophic loss in business if they get caught is a plausible set of incentives I can believe for them to not do it. Not proof, but plausible.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402
You don't get from your first point to here.
The cause of the market failure is that once you give your data to someone, you can't know what they do with it. The solution is for them to never have it in the first place.
This has technical solutions. Your data stays on your device, not their servers, or if it is on their servers then it's encrypted. Don't do anything client-server that could be federated or P2P etc. Publish the source code.
This needs a business model. But "you pay money to fund development and then get software including source code that you run on your device" is a business model. If people want this they can have it. Go stuff cash into some open source projects by subscribing to their Patreon or Substack or whatever people are using now, and then use them.
The alternative doesn't actually solve the problem. You give your data to Google, the government says Google can't do X with it, but you still have no way to verify that they're not doing X because once they have your data, X happens entirely at Google where you have no way of observing it.
It also fails to protect against covert defections by both parties where the government gets all your data in exchange for looking the other way while the corporation does whatever they want with it too. You need to be able to prove that it's not happening, or it is.
Hopefully not the kind of regulation that puts a breaking burden on companies like Brave, while letting big tech do whatever they want after a token fine.
Microsoft charges you for a Windows license and still tracks you. I have little doubt Adobe, et al, are selling your data. Amazon surely makes money when I buy something from their site, but they track me anyway. Etc, etc.
Lastly, the reason why regulations don’t work is regulations is written by lobbyists here in the US. Guess who these lobbyists represented?
No, but it can remove the necessity.
Some people can be satisfied with a business of X profitability, but once it goes public there is really no hope IMHO.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-acces...
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In fact it does the opposite. People with a demonstrated willingness to pay for stuff are more lucrative to track.
If consumers didn't use these services because of such behavior, it would no longer be profitable to do so.
It's not the job of the market to protect your privacy, that's your job. Don't use a search engine that tracks you if you're worried about being tracked. It really is that simple.
As for guarantees about not being tracked, that's agreed upon in the ToS – so if the ToS says "we can track you however you want" (e.g. Googles) then don't use it. If it says "we won't track you" (DDG's) then do.
But that's not how everybody thinks. The Craigslist leaders, for example. From 2006: "She recounts how UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn’t, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this). 'That definitely is not part of the equation,' he said, according to MediaPost. 'It’s not part of the goal.'" [1]
I do agree that privacy regulation is necessary to set a floor, though. Since our current system over-rewards juicing short-term metrics, we have to compensate by blocking the worst of the exploitative behaviors.
[1] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/craigslist-meets-the...
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Brave buying Cliqz is the first corporate acquisition that's actually made me feel better about the acquirer, ever. I have no idea how to react to that. Keeping up the dev blog would probably make me start recommending Brave, where before I recommended against it.
Incidentally, do you know what's happening to the Cliqz browser?
The paid option hasn't been explored yet, and for good reason I think: in principle, you need training data for it to be any good. And, again in principle, the only way to amass user data is for the service to be free, leveraging that to sharpen the tool.
So in principle, I reckon this is doomed to fail. But I might be wrong. I HOPE I'm wrong. And that's enough.
I don't see how a paid search engine has a disadvantage here.
Just checked wikipedia, and it seems it'll be ten years ago this June that google stole + and forced quoting upon us for pure vanity reasons.
Is there any reason I should think Brave won't prioritize profit motives first in 5, 10 years when investors or markets expect returns?
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OTA television, for example, had been providing decades worth of extremely expensive programming for free. And this lost us absolutely no privacy.
There is no reason that ads have to invade our privacy. They can go back to targeting based on broad geographical and age demographics.
Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say the government passes a law that says that ads cannot be based on any factors more privacy invasive than your zip code and 10 year age range. It’s not like companies would stop paying for ads. They would pay less, but probably still enough to maintain free services, like Google did in its initial days.
Not if the project is a non-profit. Wikipedia is free and privacy friendly (or pay what you want through donation if you want).
I barely trust my ISP.
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/arts/will-cable-tv-be-inv...
Short answer: Yes, there will be ads eventually, even if you pay for it.
I wonder if that's because they're using Bing search results rather than crawling the web themselves?
I'm convinced that it's possible to build a better search engine than Google by using community-influenced results, rather than try to do magic.
I'd definitely pay for a search engine where we can collectively downvote to hell any SEO spam. That would be the only way to incentivize sites to provide actual quality rather than cheating the algorithms.
Paid is still centralized. Decentralization isn't an answer, because people make their own decisions and a collective decision contains a lot of power. The only way to achieve true decentralization is to eliminate communication entirely. I believe it is referred to "Babel's tower". Centralization means we have no freedom and no privacy. With decentralization, 51% could conspire to murder the 49%. That experiment, taken after a few iterations, would quickly turn us extinct.
So, that doesn't sound like a sound plan. In fact it sounds a lot like everything Mozilla tried and failed to make money with in the last few years. Maybe users will pay for X .... nope they won't pay for X either. Ironically, Mozilla's main business remains reselling Google's search.
What's Brave's business model at this point? I'm assuming that the attention token business is at this point not really delivering substantial revenue.
Anyway, a couple of weaknesses here with both these business models (search and BAT):
- They are tied to Brave the browser, which while popular has a tiny market share. So, both solutions are cut off from the vast majority of users, including the fraction of a percent likely to be an early adopter of this (i.e. by actually paying). Fractions of fractions don't add up to a whole lot of revenue.
- That browser happens to be built by Google and also depended upon by Apple & Microsoft (i.e. Chromium). Between those three, they control access to most of the users via their apps stores and operating systems. They also control the main contenders Cliqz is supposed to compete with: Google, Bing & DDG (which is Bing). That sounds like an uncomfortable place to be as a would be competitor. Also, there's the Apple and Google tax to worry about with any kind of revenue: Brave users putting more cash in the coffers of Apple and Google basically.
- Users might pay for quality. That raises the question how you will get that. DDG is popular but a key reason for people to not use it remains that sometimes they just aren't good enough. And it's basically Bing, which depends on MS putting loads of cash and resources in it. I found myself reaching for Google a lot in the half year I used it until ultimately I decided that I did not have time for too many fruitless searches where I wasted time before ending up finding what I needed on Google. I reverted back to Google. And that's not because I enjoy being tracked or in their clutches: they are just that good.
- Brave as a walled garden for exclusive paid features does not make sense: it's too small. Both BAT and search as commercially offered features would have more users (and thus paying users) if they weren't tied to Brave the browser. IMHO both would actually need to be structured under a non profit organization for long term success (for users, not for Brave).
Spotify is something I'll gladly pay for because it just works and is less hassle than ads and playlists and searching for youtube videos.
Right now you can pay to host an instance of the internet meta-search engine SearX: https://searx.github.io/searx/
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Would be a nice study to determine the monthly rate one is willing to pay in order not to the be the service.
How much time do you spend in search bar and results versus one of several non-coding text editors that you subscribe to? Price accordingly.
However if someone's expenses grow with userbase, everything you said is right.
A lot of the clickstream data you can buy comes from browser extensions btw, and often gets collected without users knowing about it (looking at you, "Web of Trust"). I think their reliance on such data was the reason Cliqz acquired Ghostery, which also collects a copious amount of "anonymous" data from its users. On one hand it's a neat idea since you're basically standing on Googles' shoulders, on the other hand it's at least questionable for a "privacy-first" company as the generation of the search index is based on personal data mined from (often unwitting) users.
That said I don't know how their system evolved, so maybe today they have another way to build their index.
https://www.quora.com/Did-Bing-intentionally-copy-Googles-se...
The Ghostery extension is open source, so feel free to link to anything in the code that looks suspect to you
Also, I saw a lot of "anonymous" clickstream data offered by other companies, which was often trivial to de-anonymize. We did a DEF CON 25 talk about it, just google "Dark Data DEF CON 25". Robustly anonymizing high-dimensional data like user clickstreams is practically impossible, and often knowing a combination of 4-7 websites a user regularly visits is enough to identify him/her in a pool of millions of users (see the talk for details), so I'm highly doubtful about any company that claims it can robustly anonymize such data. If you're confident your data is anonymous why not release a large sample and have researchers look at it?
So while I'm not saying Ghostery is also doing that I don't have a lot of good faith in these data collection practices in general (also, I think before Cliqz acquired Ghostery it collected a lot of data like cookies from the users). Again, it's a smart way to collect data but I wouldn't call it very privacy-friendly.
There is a better way to service users interests; initially it was "keywords" - but now it can be more structured;
"I want to learn [topic]" and the response may be a step-by-step how-to on how to learn [topic]
TBH this was a subject addressed on NPR this morning.. People staying at home are talking about the old infra of edu where people cant be in person - but nobody is talking about the opportunity on changing the structure of learning at all - there should be seen the opportunity on changing the way in which we learn something.
On one browser installation I stopped getting payouts, reached out to them via reddit (like they asked for) and provided all the information they asked for: ghosted.
I'm also a publisher, for weeks now I can't login and it seems like I'm not getting payouts anymore either. Never got any mail about it. Sent them an email about it February 23rd, no answer so far.
If I'd have to guess, the one client somehow got blacklisted maybe because I used too many Brave installations and they think they're fraudulent? (Though I only used like 5, Brave & Brave Beta each on a desktop & laptop, then on another desktop just one installation. Also, I still get payouts for the other installations.) Or it's just another one of the bugs that eats payouts and users' BATs.
Publisher account I even have less of an idea, it's totally fine, teen-rated gaming websites with a couple of thousand organic (search traffic) uniques/month. I did sent BAT from my unconnected Browsers (you only can connect a maximum of 4 browsers to a wallet, ever) to my site to tip myself. As far as I know that isn't against the TOS either (even makes them more money because they douple dip).
But, even if they don't suspend you without any notice, it's completely non-transparent as a publisher too. You get zero statistics, just a bundled payout each month. I'd never use them like this as a publisher for bigger sites, pretty sure I mailed them about that too in the past and also did not get any reply.
Scummy stuff.
The Tor leak was already fixed in Brave Nightly when independently discovered. We were fixing as part of a HackerOne bug report, which per standard practice is not disclosed until patched in all releases. The mistake there was not forgetting to disclose, it was not airlifting the fix into Brave Stable and intermediate releases right away. We have already made process fixes; automated network leak testing is the biggest one.
If you don't like crypto-tokens, don't use them. They're optional in Brave. They have no privacy impact.
Dead Comment
The whole crypto thing in Brave especially rubs me the wrong way, it feels like a Ponzi scheme.
It’s basically just convenient
And even being an anti-masker in the COVID19 context, however misguided that might be, isn't really related to the browser's functionality.
The thing is that Cliqz was "majority-owned by Hubert Burda Media" [1], and that "The deal, terms undisclosed, makes Cliqz owner Hubert Burda Media a Brave shareholder." [2]
Doesn't Hubert Burda Media have a interest in removing ad-blocking technologies from the web? Couldn't partnering with Brave get them into a privileged position where they are capable of displaying ads and build user profiles?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliqz [2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/03/brave_buys_a_search_e...
> Brave Search's index there will be informed the activities of participating Brave users, in terms of the URLs they search for or click on, and adjacent web resources that don't require extensive crawling.
This is quite similar to Amazon's now-defunct A9.com which, iirc, had some form of hybrid search engine that was built on search / ad results from Google and the data Amazon collected via the Alexa toolbar.
> The Brave Search team has written a paper explaining its use of the term, titled "GOGGLES: Democracy dies in darkness, and so does the Web." The browser upstart aims to replace the tyranny of Google's inscrutable, authoritative index with a multiverse of indices defined by anyone with the inclination to do so.
Again, very similar to WAIS. Has Eich been speaking to Brewster Kahle? :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#History
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server
KYC-hostage demands from a company that claims to be "privacy focused"...
https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/1065594144796610560
> Brave also envisions users taking a more active role in their search results through a filtering mechanism.
"It allows different groups to run their own sort of Turing complete filter rules, sort of like ad blocking rules in the search service and not in the browser, to have a community moderated view of the global index," he [Brendan Eich, Brave founder] explained. "It's called 'Goggles.'"
I'd actually pay nominal amounts of money for a search service that had my interests in mind; as opposed to advertisers and thought police.
[0] https://hadal.io
[1] https://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-remove-pinteres...
Copyright interests pay large cash to make sure you know is truly best for you. You could show a little gratitude.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200501194956/https://cliqz.com...
This is the future of services on the internet. The 'cult of free' should die off as people realize they don't want to be bought and sold like digital cattle.
payment in Basic Attention Token... isn't that exactly how the Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc advertising business models work. BAT is basically a reward for watching adds right?
I like the idea of paying my content producers directly better, see for example https://coil.com. Cut out the middleman
(All of which are not really free because we pay for them with taxes. )