Brave launches private search ads

• uBlock-issues

  454 862 4.6

  This is the community-maintained issue tracker for uBlock Origin

  

• uBlock

  2,992 43,401 9.9 JavaScript

  uBlock Origin - An efficient blocker for Chromium and Firefox. Fast and lean.

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io featured

  Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.

  

• web-discovery-project

  7 46 8.6 JavaScript

  Web Discovery Project

  

Brave search is private in no-user-identification and no-reidentification-via-record-unlinkability senses always, both legs: we do not build user profiles. As with all engines, we learn from head of query log and what link is clicked. That is an essential first party purpose, but we collect no personal data because nothing is linkable across queries and clicks to any person.

If you opt into the Web Discovery Project (it's off by default and a separate setting), then your queries and clicks across all navigation are anonymized by dropping any with enough entropy to suspect they bear personal data, dropping IP and headers, and otherwise ensuring record-unlinkability. See

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...

and

https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project/blob/main/mod....

Because Premium Brave Search has no ads, it's not useful _per se_ for ad measurement, conversion, or modeling. But I took your question do mean "do premium search queries and outbound link clicks feed into the search engine?" -- they do. But no ads, and no way to model directly how an ad would perform, beyond the big data benefit that all search engine use to help ad sales and matching.

Last thing: with off-by-default (opt-in) Brave Rewards user ads (push => new tab on click), the matching agent is in the browser, inactive until opt-in, off upon opt-out, and you can clear its history. Confirmations and revenue shares via Chaumian blind signature protocol (Privacy Pass uses same crypto all). No server-side ad matching at all. Same for Brave News (for ads and all feeds, everything).

With search ads, matching is server-side (after the edge proxy that drops IP etc.) based on only the query, device, country, and timezone. Anything more personalized, we can go to client-side matching and ad insertion. I hope this helps.

Suggest a related project