[HN Gopher] Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no...
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Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling
Author : samizdis
Score : 694 points
Date : 2021-03-03 14:33 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| ignoramous wrote:
| 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? :)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#History
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_information_server
| ketamine__ wrote:
| It's very exciting. So far Brave is not so popular in the
| cryptocurrency space compared to its peers. That will change
| I'm sure.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| No, I haven't been talking with Brewster. The Goggles paper is
| from the Tailcat team.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Using brave for more than a year now on my phone I sometimes
| forget how terrible mobile browsing is for most people. The only
| thing that reminds me is when I sometimes open a website in
| Chrome.
|
| If the trend of paid search engines or browsers start I am
| buying. Ads and tracking are cancer of modern life. It's
| literally offering free stuff to make your life worse in
| exchange. It's "I will give you this item if you let me punch you
| in the face" kind of deal.
|
| I can't wait to support a company that collects money for their
| software and uses part of it to fight the cancer.
| pkamb wrote:
| I would love a search engine that searched mainly only Stack
| Overflow, Stack Exchange, Twitter, Flickr, and Reddit.
|
| Google results are currently awful, full of blogspam and
| Pinterest-mirrored images. I don't remember when this changed.
| mminer237 wrote:
| I mean, you _can_ search _only_ those sites with Google.
|
| Just add: (site:stackoverflow.com OR
| site:superuser.com OR site:serverfault.com OR
| site:stackexchange.com OR site:twitter.com OR site:flickr.com
| OR site:reddit.com)
|
| You could make your browser do that automatically.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=(site%3Astackoverflow.com+OR...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=(site%3Astackoverflow.com+OR...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=(site%3Astackoverflow.com+OR...
| pkamb wrote:
| I'd rather give my business to a search engine with good
| defaults.
|
| And I don't want _only_ those big sites. I 'd also like to
| see authored blogs, traditional forums, national newspapers,
| various wikis, etc.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Fair enough. I was just giving the option if you didn't
| know, but I actually feel the exact same.
| samstave wrote:
| A search funnel would be an interesting thing (does this
| exist?) whereby you whitelist "only give me results from these
| resources" - and where 'resources' can include the whitelists
| of others that you trust or have subscribed to.
|
| Basically you could have a search engine that only replies with
| information from whom are also of the same interest as you - or
| people you congenially follow etc...
|
| So you could say " show me everything about X" and the results
| are only from those who are actually connected to X in some way
| - based on the interest subscription graph as opposed to a
| keyword graph...
|
| I may be a moron on this subject - but I do recog that there is
| room for improvement...
|
| I added the following to a previous comment:
|
| * _" A cool way of implementing this would be instead of
| CTRL+SHIFT+N would be CTRL+SHIFT+N[1-9] to shift to VIEW and
| would take me to that tab-stack... and there would be a page
| that would allow me to manage each tab-stack around [TOPIC] -
| Meta Book marks..."*_
| penguin_booze wrote:
| Looks like Brendan is, in a sense, in the process of cloning
| Google, only in reverse order: browser, ads, and now search!
| ketamine__ wrote:
| Dismantling the shit one turd at a time.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| 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.
| samstave wrote:
| As mentioned in my previous comment:
|
| 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.
| sytse wrote:
| Bing might have also done this to improve their index
| https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying...
| atombender wrote:
| Cliqz seemed like a very promising search engine [1], so I'm glad
| that they've found a new home where they can try again.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200501194956/https://cliqz.com...
| onli wrote:
| It really worked quite well, especially when compared against
| ddg. Fantastic that it will survive in some form and that the
| work was not for nothing.
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Cliqz? Wasn't that the company behind that Firefox scandal with
| the Mr. Robot ads?
| gidam wrote:
| 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.
| lrae wrote:
| Also zero transparency for users and publishers.
|
| 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.
| techrat wrote:
| You forgot one. Whitelisting cross-site trackers from sites
| like Facebook and Twitter.
| junon wrote:
| Also the fact that they boast "we blocked X many ads" directly
| above a Brave-owned embedded avertisement directly in the
| browser itself.
|
| Scummy stuff.
| jeanofthedead wrote:
| You can easily remove cards, top sites, adblock counts, and
| advertisements from the Brave home page. It's customizable.
| willis936 wrote:
| Their point is not that there is an adblock counter, but
| that brave injects ads on their own homepage to inflate the
| apparent usefulness of their browser. It's similar to
| labeling a casino a buffet and saying you don't need to
| gamble.
| smbullet wrote:
| 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?
| drusepth wrote:
| Because it removes a revenue stream for many sites and
| small businesses (oftentimes the most important or _only_
| revenue stream) and replaces it with a setup where Brave
| happily benefits from holding that income in escrow until
| you can convince them to hand over whatever percent they
| think is fair to share... in their crypto. That is, of
| course, assuming they don 't ghost you, which seems like a
| common complaint among publishers.
|
| The company's got a long list of shady practices and
| "mistakes" where they haven't paid creators and/or screwed
| over users for their own profits. Even if you give them the
| benefit of the doubt and assume they just constantly make
| honest mistakes, no other browser dominates the news every
| other month with so many privacy scandals.
| JacobSuperslav wrote:
| 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"
| tharne wrote:
| Glad to see more interest in privacy focused search, but why not
| just not contribute to something like duckduckgo that's already
| doing good work in that space?
| rasengan wrote:
| As many mentioned, DDG is Bing and Google under the hood. That
| being said, DDG is great and I'm very thankful it exists.
|
| Shameless Plug: I'm involved in a project called Private Search
| [1], and we are always interested in partnerships with
| browsers. Feel free to contact me directly. My email is in my
| profile!
|
| [1] https://private.sh
| jhoechtl wrote:
| DDG is the wolf disguised as the sheep. If you consider the
| vast possibilities a company is able to trace you over the
| internets it's largely irrelevant where are you coming from, as
| long as you hop once over a server operated by BigCorp.
|
| And in the case of DDG the results come from Bing. From the
| rain in the eaves.
| lumost wrote:
| Duck duck go simply proxies other search engines. While they
| have been gaining traffic, they will never be as good as
| google/bing etc.
|
| Good privacy focused search requires novel innovations and a
| solid attempt to "solve" the problem rather than simply
| wrapping some other engine.
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| They should have some small team working on their own search
| engine. A handful of skilled programmers can accomplish a lot
| over a couple of years.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Do we know that they don't?
| fsflover wrote:
| Or better to https://yacy.net or SearX.
| coldtea wrote:
| Because DDG merely uses Google and so under the covers.
|
| Plus, we don't know DDG respects privacy, it's just some
| generic statement they make.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I believe it's a legally binding statement. Which is not as
| good as a mathematical proof, but better than nothing.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Afaik it's Bing?
| Daho0n wrote:
| As generic as Brave's then. What's your point?
| [deleted]
| Imnimo wrote:
| Goggles sounds cool at first, but it's very hard for me to
| imagine goggles that I'd be interested in actually using. Maybe
| clever people will come up with something awesome, but the fact
| that I can't come up with an example that I would want is a bit
| of an alarm bell.
| pkamb wrote:
| Remove Pinterest results, remove Quora, remove blogspam...
| pcdoodle wrote:
| I hope it will be able to find relevant results like google did
| last decade.
| joubert wrote:
| Love the audacity of building back better multiple dimensions of
| our internet experience.
|
| However:
|
| > end the debate about search engine bias by turning search
| result output over to a community-run filtering system called
| Goggles
|
| Not sure why something "community-run" would
| automatically/necessarily solve bias... So looking forward to
| deeper thinking by the Brave team.
| desmap wrote:
| @Brendan, well done! There's some way to go but I like the
| direction you took, in particular the concept of "goggles". When
| will you release the first beta?
| agumonkey wrote:
| Do you think the BAT idea will turn out to be a better system in
| the end ? in a socially good way, people who want to contribute
| to society will have better data/incentives and users will have a
| less crowded time online.
| azinman2 wrote:
| > The Brave Search team acknowledges that not all filters will
| show results that are agreeable to everyone. "There will be
| Goggles created by creationists, anti-vaccination supporters or
| flat-earthers," the paper says. "However, the biases will be
| explicit, and therefore, the choice is a conscious one."
|
| What could possibly go wrong?
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| For the love of BOb, we desperately need a search engine that
| obeys booleans (DDG doesn't) and isn't Google. Please let this be
| it.
| mberning wrote:
| I wish them the best of luck. DuckDuckGo is my go to, but it
| leaves a lot to be desired.
| tumetab1 wrote:
| That also my reaction when reading the title.
|
| More than a privacy focus search engine I want a equally good
| search engine as Google. Google has some defects but it's by
| far better than the competition.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > DuckDuckGo is my go to, but it leaves a lot to be desired
|
| I have a fantasy where a lone basement nerd storms DDG HQ and
| teaches them about quotes at gunpoint.
| Semaphor wrote:
| They won't be alone, I'm coming with them :(
| kapsteur wrote:
| The Cliqz Tech blog : https://0x65.dev contains many informations
| about how their constructed their private search engine
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Brave has earned the trust and respect of the community by fixing
| several high profile bugs. They have also dinged themselves by
| pushing their crypto ad system. How will this pan out?
|
| "We'll see" said the zen master.
| smaryjerry wrote:
| The crypto ad system is their best feature. You get browser ads
| instead of website specific ads and so any website can get
| money simply from users using brave. Also you can choose which
| websites get some of your specific ad money. It feels more like
| the money being made off of you is also being spent by you.
| Taking power away from big tech.
| nige123 wrote:
| A way to compete with Google is to leverage user's search trails
| in the browser - by recording the click paths on Google (and
| other search engines).
|
| Recording and intersecting search trails is covered by this
| patent:
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2005069161A1
|
| The rationale is here:
|
| https://www.jinfo.com/go/blog/2505
| imwillofficial wrote:
| "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.
| pier25 wrote:
| The SaaS project I'm working on won't have a free tier. We
| think it's unfair to make paying customers support free
| customers.
| fullstop wrote:
| I wonder if payment in BAT will be an option?
| elwell wrote:
| Probably, but you'll probably have to KYC as well...
| mozey wrote:
| > payment in BAT
|
| 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
| fullstop wrote:
| It's an _optional_ reward, and that is the key difference
| in my opinion.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| As long as your crusade against free doesn't impact our free
| public libraries, free healthcare, free education.
|
| (All of which are not really free because we pay for them with
| taxes. )
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Matching the accuracy of Google results will be a challenge. It's
| remarkable how (at least for the topics I tend to search for)
| good the results are compared to every alternative (Bing, DDG
| etc). I made a search tool that filters, modifies, resorts, and
| adds to results from Bing's API. I no longer use it, because the
| base Bing results (This applies to everything else I've tried
| too) aren't on the same level as Google's.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| That's interesting cos on the few occassions I've accidentally
| used Google (e.g. when searching on someone else's device) I've
| been surprised by how bad Google is nowdays. I have the same
| experience when I set up a new device for myself. I'll be like
| "Wow these results are unusually bad... Oh wait this is Google,
| let's change the default search engine to DDG now. Let's try
| again, ah that's much better!" Pretty much the only Google
| property I still fall back onto every now and then is Maps but
| even there OSM is improving all the time.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| i find that google drive me towards certain websites. This
| ruins my user experience. They also omit many websites.
| mrvenkman wrote:
| Competing with Google is going to be difficult. I have a
| question: What is the consensus on forwarding any search "terms"
| to Google and then "scraping" the results back into the user -
| sort of a "proxy" search.
|
| I mean - Google built their business on searching the internet,
| why can't there be a business that starts by searching Google?
| birdsbirdsbirds wrote:
| How do you continue once you are big enough to be a threat to
| Google?
| npteljes wrote:
| You mean like Startpage?
| ehsankia wrote:
| Forget Google, how are they gonna compete with DDG who has the
| "privacy conscious" market niche pretty well covered. That
| seems to be their main competitor here.
|
| Having a semi-popular browser where they can set the default
| search engine would normally help, but if it's not free, I
| don't see why anyone would pay when, again, DDG does the same
| thing for free.
|
| Let alone the rumors of Apple wanting to make its own search
| engine...
| guerrilla wrote:
| Even if it turns out to be better, my question is how are
| they practically going to onboard users like me (and the
| people I know.) Like I might try it out of curiosity because
| I saw it here on HN but I really doubt a lot of people care.
| DDG works fine for them.
| mrvenkman wrote:
| Good point. It's the DOS (Windows) vs Unix/Linux argument
| in a way.
| lrae wrote:
| Their own browser's users would probably just end up paying
| in their BAT tokens or be able to use it for free, as long as
| they have ad rewards program enabled in the browser.
| [deleted]
| leprechaun1066 wrote:
| > What is the consensus on forwarding any search "terms" to
| Google and then "scraping" the results back into the user -
| sort of a "proxy" search.
|
| Isn't this what DuckDuckGo does but with Bing?
| elwell wrote:
| https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/
| mrvenkman wrote:
| My understanding is that "DDG" have their own "web crawler"?
|
| What I understand from your reply is that they don't?
|
| So if I search on Bing for a specific keyword, I will get the
| same results from DDG.
|
| What about misspelled words? I have used DDG before.. for
| about two weeks. They offer poor suggestions for my
| misspelling.
|
| What I'm suggesting is using Google results even after
| misspellings. What are the laws on scraping Google for
| suggestions/misspellings?
| kuu wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26328872
|
| (I'm not sure if even duplicated)
| chanmad29 wrote:
| Are there any brave users out there? no pun. I use ff with DDG on
| PC and safari with DDG on ios. Never understood the reason for a
| move. The ad rewards was just too much information for me, from
| brave.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I've recently moved to Brave because of their addition of IPS
| (which I see as an interesting technology). I've been really
| happy with Brave - especially on Mobile which feel way
| snappier.
|
| Also not having to install a 3rd pary ad blocker (uBlock
| Origin) makes me feel more comfortable. Firefox should ship
| with a good ad blocker - it does not.
|
| I've not played around with BAT yet - it's on my TODO list.
|
| Brave seems to be pushing the boundaries more than other
| browsers, and it'll be interesting to watch where things go.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| Obv meant IPFS
| pier25 wrote:
| Switched to Brave about 6 months ago on macOS, iOS, Android,
| and Windows. Very happy with it.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| See https://brave.com/transparency for our growth to date and
| other stats.
|
| The ad system is off by default, AKA opt-in. Did you hear
| otherwise?
| crorella wrote:
| "What if we could give customers a button. They'd press it at the
| end of the year and it would automagically file their taxes for
| them."
|
| This is exactly how it works in Chile, you pretty much check the
| numbers and make sure they match with your figures and done. For
| free.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Are you posting in the right thread?
| [deleted]
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| I don't know much about Brave - What is their position on
| censorship (other than instances when it is legally required)?
| samizdis wrote:
| The Register article mentions it in passing, pointing to the
| "Goggles" paper [1] that Brave has published. But the Brave
| paper actually gives no more information than that quoted in
| the article; it seems not to address its stance on censorship,
| but merely to pass the buck in the Goggles use case:
|
| _There will be Goggles created by creationists, anti-
| vaccination sup- porters or flat-earthers. However, the biases
| will be explicit, and therefore, the choice is a conscious one.
| We do not anticipate any need for censorship in the context of
| Goggles. Clearly illegal and sensitive content like child
| pornography or extreme violence should already be filtered out
| by the host search engine at the index layer. Consequently,
| such content should not be surfaced by any Goggle._
|
| [1]
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-B3ZvHpbnxsT2OdnUH8vS3-tvTv...
| dazc wrote:
| Likely the same as Google, no policy on censorship until they
| feel like censoring something.
| [deleted]
| mancerayder wrote:
| Coincidence? https://seekingalpha.com/news/3668882-google-wont-
| sell-ads-b...
| qwertox wrote:
| I don't feel that good about this.
|
| 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...
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| 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.
| mminer237 wrote:
| 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.
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| I don't dispute that you can get real money out the far end
| but even if you ignore the problematic aspects of crypto as
| a technology you still have to deal with the problematic
| aspects of it as a currency including rapid fluctuations in
| value and the time it takes to settle a transaction.
| mminer237 wrote:
| I guess that could a bit annoying at times, but ad
| revenue isn't some super precise amount. Price
| fluctuations should balance themselves out, and the minor
| settle time is not a big deal when you're typically paid
| monthly.
| PufPufPuf wrote:
| But the amount of USD you get varies by BAT-USD exchange
| rate, e.g. you actually get paid in BAT, correct?
|
| I must admit that I find this business model genius:
| replace website ads with your ads, pocket the revenue, and
| "pay" users in a self-issued cryptocurrency. Stealing ad
| revenue from websites while simultaneously doing an ICO.
| mminer237 wrote:
| That's correct. But advertisers bid in BAT too, so if the
| value drops, they would pay more nominally, and it would
| all balance out.
|
| As a user, I prefer Brave's ads though. They're not
| actually on websites. And calling adblocking "stealing"
| seems like a bit of an exaggeration. Brave still pays out
| a larger share of their revenue to publishers than Google
| does. As a publisher, Brave's scheme seems fair to me
| too. The only one really hurt is Google.
| cute_boi wrote:
| can we trust brave? They have become too shady in my opinion like
| inserting referral etc?
| willis936 wrote:
| I tried brave a year ago because I heard good things. I stopped
| using it within a month. The cryptocurrency and referral stuff
| told me all I needed to know: their motives are not aligned
| with the user. If you let your monetization strategy alienate
| your users then you won't be getting far. Early adopters need
| clear messages of trust.
|
| When the messaging is "we're desperate for money" and I don't
| trust you, why would I expect you to value my privacy? I won't
| be trying brave again until they at least try to address this.
| justfortechnews wrote:
| Seems to me that you're a small minority, and that most Brave
| users feel that the company IS aligned with them. The
| cryptocurrency was a key aspect for early user adoption, and
| the referral stuff is something that I only ever see
| mentioned on HN by clearly-biased commenters.
|
| The messaging is not 'we're desperate for money', it's 'we're
| not funded by selling our users' personal data and are
| working to make a browser product that can self-sustain',
| something that, as of now, no other browser has been able to
| do.
| willis936 wrote:
| When someone flags legitimate concerns you can't dismiss
| them with them being "clearly biased" and saying "most
| people don't feel that way".
|
| When I ask, "why should I trust brave?", the response I get
| is biased gaslighting. I guess that means I shouldn't trust
| them.
| techrat wrote:
| The amount in which I've experienced this exact scenario
| on Hacker News is quite disheartening.
|
| When I provided a cite wherein Brave was caught
| whitelisting trackers, I was responded to with basically
| "those who are so quick to criticize Brave" don't give
| the same scrutiny to other browsers. Whelp, other
| browsers don't position themselves as the Privacy King
| like Brave and its adherents do.
|
| Whataboutism isn't a defense.
|
| Your description of it being gaslighting is very apt.
| Miner49er wrote:
| Does Firefox/Mozilla sell users' personal data? They claim
| not to.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| User data mostly has short shelf life so what happens is
| API renting, not selling. That's what Google does via its
| ad exchange, which is fed by many signals but notably by
| search. Search ads also make Google the most money, but
| all their businesses use a single ad exchange.
|
| Firefox has a default search deal with Google that makes
| most of their revenue. So does Safari (edit: the Safari
| deal of course does not make most of Apple's revenue, but
| it is rumored to be big, multiple $B/yr). These are how
| personal data flows to Google for big money back. (Chrome
| is worse: if you log into a Google account in any tab,
| then unless you opt out via your account settings, your
| navigation is tracked by the mothership.)
|
| Brave doesn't have such a Google deal, and Brave Search
| won't collect personal or re-identifiable data.
| justfortechnews wrote:
| Not sure, I don't use Firefox. I'd assume they don't,
| given that a lot of the privacy ethics in Brave carried
| over from Mozilla.
| Miner49er wrote:
| I personally trust Firefox way more than Brave.
| prionassembly wrote:
| What is the referral stuff? The crypto is optional.
| Daho0n wrote:
| They got caught with the fingers in the cookie jar and
| quickly backtracked:
|
| _" Brave Software's co-founder and CEO, Brendan Eich, said
| on Twitter that he didn't believe there was anything wrong
| with injecting affiliate codes into web addresses. However,
| it seems the backlash worked, as Brave's developers are
| introducing a toggle for the suggestions, and the
| functionality will be disabled by default starting with the
| next stable release."_
|
| https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-
| caugh...
| BrendanEich wrote:
| We fix bugs we didn't know about as soon as they're
| reported. To assert malice not stupidity needs more
| evidence, or else it's just based on your ill will.
| ICYMI, thread:
|
| https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/136716134816601702
| 4
| Daho0n wrote:
| If it were a bug then why say it is fine? I'm not saying
| it wasn't but normally I don't see people calling
| something a bug and at the same time defending it?
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| You never could trust Brave. Their business has been unethical
| since its founding.
| Daho0n wrote:
| People are so desperate to like Brave that they can't see the
| bad things. I wouldn't trust Brave, especially when there are
| better options like Mozilla that isn't part of the monolith
| that is Chrome. It's the new Internet Explorer no matter what
| skin you theme it with.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| Mozilla depends almost entirely on Google for revenue. As
| Firefox loses share, it gets less. This looks likely to
| spiral down until a collapse of some sort. I was stunned to
| learn that Apple has hired 35 people (almost all engineers)
| from Mozilla over the last few years.
| Daho0n wrote:
| And when Firefox dies what do you think will happen to
| chromium? Suddenly APIs will be removed if needed by Brave
| or adblockers (already happening). Brave is helping keep
| chrome as the defacto standard, IE. helping nailing the
| coffin shut above Firefox. Brave is part of the problem,
| not the fix. The better Brave gets the worse it is.
|
| Edit: Spelling.
| jerf wrote:
| "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.
| tylersmith wrote:
| 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.
| ohduran wrote:
| 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.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| 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.
| gtirloni wrote:
| 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.
| ohduran wrote:
| It's a good point. I'm no expert, so take this with a grain
| of salt, but assuming that it's just a matter of
| infrastructure, then Bing wouldn't suck so much. Microsoft
| has the means, the engineering power and the incentive to
| crush a direct competitor. And yet, it sucks.
|
| So in practice, the more data you have, the better the
| engine is. I don't have a theoretical reason for why that
| is the case, but thing is I don't actually need it.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Every time you click a result link, and every time you
| bounce back from that link, probably also scroll position
| and hovering, you are providing potentially useful training
| data.
| pizzapill wrote:
| One very simple metric to improve search results is testing
| how long a user visits a site. When users search for
| something, click a link and return to google seconds later
| you can assume that the result did not match what the user
| was searching for.
| iaml wrote:
| Why can't search engine just ask the user if this site
| was relevant instead of using tracking to do it?
| thekyle wrote:
| Because then SEOs would write bots to keep clicking that
| their site is relevant to everything.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| But you can get SEOs to fake metrics, too.
| ohduran wrote:
| because the underlying assumption is that what they'll
| tell you is the truth, and that's not necessarily the
| case. Think of a Firefox plugin in, AdNauseam style, that
| always says NO.
| hedora wrote:
| Then why aren't Google results any better (arguably
| worse) than search engines that don't do this?
| Daho0n wrote:
| They are better. Maybe not to you but there's a reason
| Google is as big as it is. DDG, Bing, etc. are just
| awful.
| prionassembly wrote:
| Because they're so dominant they can make changes to the
| system that make it _worse_. Haven 't you noticed the
| decline in quality of Google search results over these
| past few years?
| schnable wrote:
| They are better IME - I use DDG but still need to switch
| to Google for many searches to find what I'm looking for.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| What makes you think Google's results are worse?
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| i find google is useless at this. They throw out
| irrelevant results that the Wise Men of Google think you
| want to see, or that they'd like you to see. DDG pay more
| attention to your wording. The drawback is they have
| fewer indexed pages.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| You find Google is useless at what?
| sdesol wrote:
| I'd also wager this is probably the most useful or close
| to the most useful metrics you can use. With this metric,
| plus the user's persona (male or female, teen or elderly,
| and so forth), you have a fairly accurate user driven
| ranking system.
| schnable wrote:
| 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.
| ohduran wrote:
| You can't have one without the other. The economic
| incentives are just too intense.
| Graffur wrote:
| I don't understand. Why can't you have one without the
| other?
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| ohduran probably means that there is no a priori logical
| reason for the two to go together. In theory they could
| be separated. However, it is far too enticing of a profit
| opportunity to use aggregated data if one has it en masse
| to sell personalized data.
|
| I happen to disagree; almost any for-profit business is
| going to be doing some sort of aggregated usage data. I
| mean at the most basic level they've got to be tracking
| the number of customers they have. That doesn't mean all
| for-profit businesses ultimately devolve into data
| selling businesses.
|
| Although perhaps ohduran is advancing a more nuanced
| argument. In particular perhaps the more detailed usage
| data you track, the more likely the siren call of selling
| that data is to be attractive. In order to compete with
| Google on search quality, perhaps you do need
| sufficiently detailed usage data that the call becomes
| irresistible.
|
| I'm still not convinced that's true, but I could see how
| it plays out.
| ohduran wrote:
| Oh wow, perhaps I was too terse and left too much room
| for interpretation. I meant that there is no way for a
| for-profit company to eventually sell personalized
| segment data once it has it, even if there were initial
| promises not to do so.
|
| In that regard, the "siren call", as dwohnitmok says,
| it's a very appropriate way of encapsulating what I
| meant. You can be bold and not do it, but as soon as you
| have investors, they are going to demand it , pressure
| you into doing it, and if you do not comply replace you
| with someone who will not be sitting in a potentially
| profitable line of business and do nothing.
| boogies wrote:
| > I'm actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I
| pay for.
|
| Right now you can pay to host an instance of the internet meta-
| search engine SearX: https://searx.github.io/searx/
| addicted wrote:
| 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.
| asddubs wrote:
| 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.
| xtracto wrote:
| 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)
| Bjartr wrote:
| On that last point, searches like `-site:example.com` looks
| like they still work.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| 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.
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| 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?
| [deleted]
| michaelbrave wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| I don't really even want to think what I would pay Google to
| access their search engine if they made it a paid service
| tomorrow.
| asddubs wrote:
| 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.
| hlava wrote:
| 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
| wayne wrote:
| 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.
| dimes wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| gambler wrote:
| _> Government regulation is needed._
|
| 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.
| Proven wrote:
| > We can't rely on the market to protect our privacy.
| Government regulation is needed.
|
| Oh yeah? How about if you sign a contract that says you'll
| never sell my info? Do I still need the government to protect
| me?
| danbruc wrote:
| At least you can probably take them to court if you pay for
| the service and not being tracked but they still do.
| hsnewman wrote:
| I would assume it would be mediated.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| Seems to me that depends on the kind of regulation. If it's
| just "trust the regulator to keep ahead of Google" than
| that's one thing. But we can add other constraints on top
| of that. E.g., we could require that Google's privacy-
| relevant code be open source, and that they must give you
| data all data related to you, such that individuals could
| audit things and prove or disprove that Google's behavior
| matches their claims.
|
| Especially if we add bounties for catching Google's
| transgressions, I expect we could do quite well open-
| source, personalized regulation.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > E.g., we could require that Google's privacy-relevant
| code be open source, and that they must give you data all
| data related to you, such that individuals could audit
| things and prove or disprove that Google's behavior
| matches their claims.
|
| What happens if they lie? They have the data, they give
| you the code that does the user-facing thing with the
| data, then they copy the data to some other system where
| some unspecified foreign subsidiary uses it for arbitrary
| nefarious purposes without telling anybody.
|
| And as much as it might help to have a law requiring
| cloud services to publish all their source code so people
| can verify that they're doing at least that part of what
| they say they're doing, do you really expect that to be
| enacted?
| wpietri wrote:
| I think the right regulatory fix depends a lot on which
| particular service we're talking about and what the
| threats are. But the general goal of mandatory
| transparency reporting is to minimize the size of the
| possible lie. And I think that works even better when
| individuals and civil society groups have the opportunity
| to verify that. E.g., look at how many companies have
| been caught hoovering up data thanks to individual
| investigators looking at app behavior.
|
| I don't think a law requiring all code to be published
| would get passed. But key code for, say, personalization
| algorithms? That seems doable. Places like health
| departments, ag inspectors, and workplace safety agencies
| get to inspect the physical machinery of production all
| the time. No reason we can't start extending that in to
| the virtual realm. Companies won't be excited for it, but
| they might prefer it to some of the more heavy-handed
| proposals going around now. (E.g., section 230 reform,
| antitrust concerns.)
| jerf wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19462402
| nabusman wrote:
| Grocery stores do not just use the data internally but also
| sell their Point of Sale data to third parties that analyze
| it and then sell their analysis to anyone willing to pay
| for it (mostly that is CPG companies). Point is: it isn't
| necessarily a direct benefit to the end customer.
| jonaf wrote:
| I have never looked this up, but anytime I'm checking out
| at a brick and mortar store, I'm asked, casually, "Phone
| number?" Or "Zip code?" As if thats information that is
| necessary to check out. My response is always, politely,
| "you don't need that information." It annoys my wife
| because she thinks I'm being rude, but frankly the
| question I'm being asked is uncouth. Would you ask a
| stranger how many children they have or what time they
| get off work? Not unless you had some intention to use
| that information!
| chronogram wrote:
| How do tourists react to those questions, or how does
| your wife react to stores not asking such questions in
| other countries?
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| I actually requested a card at Safeway (wanted for
| convenience, not privacy), but apparently they are not
| giving those out anymore. You have to give them your
| phone number or else accept the additional costs for your
| food and lack of benefits at the gas station.
|
| The rewards card is a much better model in my opinion
| because while it gives them quite a bit of data, it does
| provide some anonymity. I'm sure it is possible to
| reconstruct from that data who I am (i.e. convert it into
| direct PII like name and address), but that at least
| takes a lot more effort and processing than if they have
| my phone number.
|
| Most people are ok giving up SOME privacy for the sake of
| convenience/cost savings. I doubt most people are truly
| willing to give up all privacy for said benefits once
| they understand what they are actually giving up.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Just poison the data.
|
| Phone number? 212 555 1212. (You could change to the
| local area code if you feel like it.)
|
| ZIP code? 90210, in Beverly Hills, of course. Or 01234,
| which is Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| The problem is that this info is tied to warranty
| information sometimes.
| Morizero wrote:
| Local area code plus Jenny's number has worked everywhere
| I've ever tried
| ehsankia wrote:
| > It is necessary, but not sufficient
|
| Doesn't DDG contradict that?
| mokus wrote:
| DDG makes me nervous because I don't actually understand
| their business model. Which isn't to say they don't have
| a well-known and viable one but I haven't personally
| looked into it and as a result my gut feeling is that
| they are probably not an exception to this.
|
| I use them anyway because they at least claim to be
| private and haven't yet given me specific reason to doubt
| it. I probably should at some point take the time,
| though, to try to actually understand how they can viably
| exist in a way that isn't going to succumb to the same
| corrupting incentives as google.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Their business model is simple:
|
| - build a useable search engine
|
| - show ads to users
|
| User acquisition is based on word of mouth and a bit of
| guerrilla marketing: they are a search engine with decent
| quality that doesn't spy on you.
|
| Not spying and not selling tracking data to others cost
| them some opportunities but gives them "free" users that
| would otherwise have stayed with Google.
|
| The last few years Google has been busily lowering their
| quality so even if DDG haven't improved much they feel
| very close to Google these days. (Also, retrying in
| Google takes 2 seconds from DDG, while retrying in DDG
| after trying in Google first takes 15 seconds and more
| thinking.)
| roenxi wrote:
| One of their core tenants (privacy) is unprofitable.
| There will be internal pressure to drop it.
|
| Note how their predecessor, Google, started out lovable
| and quirky but then that facade crumbled under the weight
| of success.
|
| I like DDG, I use DDG, I recommend DDG. And I don't even
| care about the privacy. All that matters to me is my
| search habits, emails and business-related-data are
| controlled by different entities.
|
| But at some point I expect the privacy aspect of DDG will
| be a memory rather than a current talking point. The
| incentives are pretty simple.
| anchpop wrote:
| My worry with that business model is that people
| concerned about privacy enough to switch to DDG probably
| are really likely to use adblock
| bogwog wrote:
| I use an ad blocker and DDG, but I still see ads when I
| search for something. The ads appear like Google search
| ads, but clearly labeled, so I doubt my ad blocker is
| going to be able to detect them without a feature to
| specifically target DDG.
|
| I don't have a problem with those ads, since they're not
| overly intrusive, they're clearly labeled, and they're
| not targeted to me based on my personal information.
| Plus, DDG actually gives me the option to disable ads
| completely.
|
| That's what "don't be evil" should look like.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| My worry is that if they ever achieved a dominant,
| Google-like position in the marketplace, that they would
| eventually lapse and go for greed. Even if the current
| DDG leadership is principled in this respect, companies
| go through turnover. Can't be evil > don't be evil.
| skinkestek wrote:
| If/when that happen the HN crowd should look at it as a
| business opportunity.
|
| I can be an early customer.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| DDG lets you turn off their ads in their own settings, so
| I don't think they're worried about it.
| idrios wrote:
| If it ever leaked that DDG was tracking user data, they
| would lose their only competitive advantage and lose all
| their users
| jasonv wrote:
| Personally, I don't mind an ad or two. It's not ads, per
| se, that have me using an ad blocker... it's the "bad UI
| impact of tons of ads and pop-ups" that keep me in ad
| block mode. When a site wants me to turn off the ad
| blocker and it doesn't look insane, I'm happy to comply.
| Same with DDG.
| boogies wrote:
| As others have mentioned, they run ads -- based on the
| search query of the page they appear on. They also (not
| unlike Brave) participate in affiliate programs. They get
| referral commissions when they funnel people to Amazon or
| eBay, whether through their shopping carousels or through
| !bangs.
|
| > use them anyway because they at least claim to be
| private
|
| Me too, at least there's probably some chance they get
| sued if they're as terrible as Google. But
|
| > haven't yet given me specific reason to doubt it
|
| I do doubt they're as private as they could be, because
| they act a lot like I imagine a honeypot does, hide their
| source code, and have had serious past privacy problems
| in other products
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23708166 'We're not
| _collecting_ your info, our servers are _receiving_ it
| but just trust us we just throw it away').
| prox wrote:
| DDG does have ads, but with a limited scope, your search
| patterns are only used for a limited time.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Don't they have ads? In reality, tracking doesn't do much
| when it specifically comes to search engine ads, since
| the user is literally giving you their intent in the
| search query itself. Tracking is more useful for showing
| ads as you browse the web in general. DDG can do
| effective search ads without any actual tracking, and
| that's their business model, which is very similar to
| Google Search.
| jerf wrote:
| Well, since the thing it is "necessary but not
| sufficient" for is me to be convinced you aren't tracking
| me, it does not. I use them as the best current
| alternative, but as I alluded to in my first comment, I'd
| be _much_ more comfortable with them if I could give them
| some money.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I'm not sure DDG can be considered an example of the
| default position in the search market.
|
| Granted, OP didn't explicitly state they were discussing
| the most common behaviour in the market, but it remains a
| stretch to take them to be be stating a law that must be
| strictly true for any social construct that could be
| called a market.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 'tracking' is a broad term but websites do track what you
| click on and if you return to the search results and
| click another link after clicking on the first link -
| this indicates that the first link didn't give the
| searcher the correct answer they were looking for.
| Whether or not that's tracking is up to you. DDG also of
| course does tracking for security purposes - scraping
| their search results doesn't go over well unless you also
| have a financial stake in outwitting their anti-abuse
| stuff.
| ehsankia wrote:
| > 'tracking' is a broad term
|
| Right, in this context though it's referring to users
| themselves being tracked. Tracking how well the results
| to a specific query did doesn't require any sort of user-
| specific data. You're just logging stats about the
| results themselves, not the user.
| vinger wrote:
| But paying for a service connects your real world credit
| profile to this transaction. I feel privacy is already
| broken with the credit card companies selling this
| information.
|
| When someone tracks you and you don't pay they will try to
| link your online activities and identify other activities
| online to tailor an ad to you.
|
| I can confuse and lie to the second group but I can't hide
| from the first group.
|
| Anything that requires you to pay by credit card means you
| are already being tracked. For privacy I'm against pay
| services.
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| Services like Privacy.com offer single purpose credit
| cards which can help mitigate the linking of an account
| to a payment source.
| vinger wrote:
| Now you have to trust privacy.com and still worry about
| the others.
| jerf wrote:
| I'm not worried about a company knowing I am their
| customer, with some name and credit card number.
|
| I'm worried about them participating in the global
| privacy free for all where they sell my info everywhere
| and abusively correlate it with the info others have to
| learn things about me.
|
| Search terms are a particularly rich source of this sort
| of thing.
|
| I don't think "privacy" is much about keeping all info
| away from people, I think it's about the correlation.
| Keeping info away is a natural and sensible precaution in
| an environment of rampant correlation, but if that didn't
| exist I wouldn't need to resort to complete information
| starvation.
|
| YMMV.
| vinger wrote:
| The credit card company is the one selling your
| relationships and purchase habits and they know exactly
| who you are and can connect you to everything else
| important in your life.
| tshaddox wrote:
| What about Wikipedia? Do you consider the minimal logging
| they claim to do to be "user tracking" in the bad sense? Or
| do you think they're doing more bad user tracking in
| secret?
| burkaman wrote:
| Wikipedia is a special case for me because it's owned by
| a non-profit which has thoroughly proven it can sustain
| itself on donations and grants.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Though perhaps not all that well: https://en.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
| yellowapple wrote:
| That article doesn't seem to account for actual traffic
| growth.
| burkaman wrote:
| I'm sure reasonable people can disagree about how much
| money Wikipedia needs to raise and what projects are
| essential, but the main point stands.
|
| Although, I'm not sure it's reasonable to call linear
| expense growth "cancerous".
| tomtheelder wrote:
| The author of that certainly has a point, but the cancer
| analogy feels SO forced and is really off-putting.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Yeah... I almost didn't link it because of that.
| Sodman wrote:
| Internet companies outside of the ad space also track you
| because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, much
| like grocery stores. They use it to inform product
| decisions by answering questions such as: Which features
| are our users using the most? Which features are the _most
| profitable_ users using the most? How do we get more people
| to the end of the sales funnel? etc.
|
| Are you ok with this kind of tracking? Genuinely asking...
| Personally I see it as "less bad" than straight up selling
| my data to another company, but I would still prefer
| companies didn't automatically track me at all, and instead
| relied on interviews with real users. Or at least make the
| tracking opt-in, Nielsen style.
| n0w wrote:
| I'm on the fence about this. From personal experience
| I'll nearly always opt-out just because I can. However I
| think this kind of user tracking is a better way to
| inform product decisions than user interviews.
|
| Asking a user for their opinion about something doesn't
| generally provide as much valuable insight as monitoring
| their usage of a product.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Agreed, however thats a poor example. Your purchases are
| tracked via loyalty programs, which you are compensated for
| with a reduced price on goods.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't understand why that makes it a poor example?
| imwillofficial wrote:
| The original comment I was referring to mentioned that
| paying for a service does not free you from tracking, and
| used groceries as an example. That is a poor example
| because you are being compensated for your opting in to
| tracking.
|
| A better example would be something you pay for, and
| you're still tracked with no compensation.
|
| Does that answer your question?
| hedora wrote:
| But, they hiked prices when the loyalty programs started in
| my area. At the very least, there's a moral hazard of
| double dipping (charge normal margins for loyalty card
| users, double margins for everyone else).
| shalmanese wrote:
| You don't have access to the alternate universe where
| they didn't introduce a loyalty program to compare
| prices. Grocery prices go up naturally due to inflation
| so it's impossible to disentangle.
|
| Groceries are also one of the most price sensitive items
| people buy and grocery stores run on incredibly thin
| margins so it's dubious to believe that a grocery story
| has much control over their pricing, independant of a
| loyalty card. If they could raise prices after the
| introduction of a card to increase total profits, why
| couldn't they have done it before then?
|
| Far more likely is that they're using the extra revenue
| from the card to lower prices for you and gain market
| share from their competitors but the lower prices are
| swallowed up by general price increases.
| jsnell wrote:
| People who don't sign up loyalty programs and other
| similar schemes have shown that they aren't price
| sensitive. They're the ideal segment to fleece via price
| discrimination.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/12/08/craigslist-meets-
| the...
| yhoneycomb wrote:
| Craigslist is the exception, not the rule.
| wpietri wrote:
| Did I give you some reason to think I was suggesting
| otherwise?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yep. That's why "loyalty cards" exist. Since they're not
| allowed to associate your purchases (or really any data)
| with your CC number to build a profile they give you a
| separate ID number that you key-in/scan when you buy
| things.
|
| "Oh but you don't have to use your loyalty card."
|
| Technically true but it's not "get a discount if you use
| your loyalty card" it's now "pay really inflated prices if
| you don't."
| wpietri wrote:
| For what it's worth, I know people share loyalty cards
| across large groups to mess this up. Me, I just eat the
| cost. Developing a "I will not play your games" has been
| great. I know people who absolutely obsess over gamified
| consumption (e.g., airline miles) and I'm glad to have
| the brain space for things that matter.
| grecy wrote:
| It certainly is if you use any kind of reward or "points"
| card .
| ragnese wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| TheKarateKid wrote:
| Exactly. We could end up like cable television where we pay
| for the service and STILL get shown ads and in the Internet's
| case, tracked.
| akudha wrote:
| Until the situation improves, maybe we can just pay cash for
| groceries?
| fastball wrote:
| 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.
| prepend wrote:
| > Targeted ads are profitable because consumers continue to
| use services that track and then target them.
|
| Demand based systems aren't always a good measure. Human
| trafficking has demand and people use those services. And
| there's a, sadly, large number of people who want and
| purchase if available. No it needs to be fought on the
| supply side by stopping traffickers and protecting
| trafficked.
|
| Companies use targeted ads because they work and are
| available. Not because they are moral.
| fastball wrote:
| Pretty wild comparison.
|
| Tracking is amoral, human trafficking is _immoral_.
| prepend wrote:
| They certainly aren't equivalent by any means. But
| disproving GP's point that targeted ads are used because
| people want them, therefore should be allowed.
|
| Targeted ads and the data slurping involved is immoral to
| me. Not human trafficking bad, but probably as bad as
| working for coco cola.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Simply paying for a service doesn't remove the economic
| incentive for the service provider to add tracking.
|
| 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.
| solso wrote:
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Please let us know if that changes.
|
| 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?
| BrendanEich wrote:
| https://www.burda.com/en/news/cliqz-closes-areas-browser-
| and...
| Technetium wrote:
| Interesting post https://cliqz.com/en/magazine/farewell-
| from-cliqz
| bogwog wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I wonder if that's because they're using Bing search results
| rather than crawling the web themselves?
| aloisdg wrote:
| > As long as we all expect free, we can't expect privacy.
|
| Not if the project is a non-profit. Wikipedia is free and
| privacy friendly (or pay what you want through donation if you
| want).
| eznzt wrote:
| So basically a search engine that is worse than Google and that
| I will have to pay for. Sign me right up!!
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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.
| glitchc wrote:
| Cable in the 1980s comes to mind:
|
| 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.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| 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.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| bat tokens will eventually make sense to everyone we're
| probably just 10 years too early into the private browsing
| space
| jhoechtl wrote:
| There is a cost in order to be free(ed).
|
| Would be a nice study to determine the monthly rate one is
| willing to pay in order not to the be the service.
| Terretta wrote:
| Perhaps the going rate could be established in "units of text
| editor subscription".
|
| 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.
| hoolihan wrote:
| Paid services have the real name and credit card. It's too
| risky to assume they won't turn evil in the future.
|
| I barely trust my ISP.
| [deleted]
| fouc wrote:
| The Brave browser already has tracking itself, so even if the
| search engine doesn't..
| jonathansampson wrote:
| The browser does not track users. What have you seen to suggest
| otherwise? Any data? It's fairly trivial to examine the network
| activity of a browser, as Leith has done at
| https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf,
| and determine to what degree (if at all) it is tracking a user.
| mind_half_full wrote:
| +1
| m1117 wrote:
| Why are people so hesitant of sharing their browsing information?
| I think it's physiological. I'm happy that there're algorithms
| that analyze my behavior. Google doesn't identify me personally,
| it just sees me as a behavioral pattern. But it's nice to have
| alternative approaches.
| MikusR wrote:
| Mozilla was sending your browser history to Cliqz in Germany.
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/firefox-tests-cliqz-engine-whi...
| solso wrote:
| Mozilla never did such a thing. The browsing history was never
| sent in any shape or form. As the journalistic article you
| quote states, Mozilla put in place the HumanWeb[1,2,3], which
| was a privacy preserving data collection which ensured record-
| unlinkability, hence no session or history. Anonymity was
| guaranteed and the framework was extensively tested by privacy
| researchers from both Cliqz and Mozilla. Disclaimer: I worked
| at Cliqz.
|
| [1]https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-02/is-data-collection-
| evil.htm... [2]https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-03/human-web-
| collecting-data-i... [3]https://0x65.dev/blog/2019-12-04/human-
| web-proxy-network-hpn...
| a254613e wrote:
| https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2017/10/06/testing-
| cliqz-i...
|
| > Users who receive a version of Firefox with Cliqz will have
| their browsing activity sent to Cliqz servers, including the
| URLs of pages they visit.
| solso wrote:
| The chosen excerpt omits the fact that it is predicated on
| the HumanWeb. In the technical papers above there is a more
| precise description on what and how was collected. There
| was no user tracking, session or history being sent as all
| data points are anonymous and record-unlinkable by the
| receiver. The vague language, required for a general
| audience journal, certainly does not help.
| a254613e wrote:
| Yup. As far as I'm concerned cliqz (and mozilla) completely
| lost my trust with that spyware.
|
| Modified installers, randomly served to customers with no
| notification, opt-out by default, and sending full browser
| history to random servers is just too much for me to ever trust
| them that they have my privacy interests as their goal.
| jansan wrote:
| What I want to see in a search engine is this: An array of
| customizable buttons that you can select to hint at the type of
| search that you are doing. News, Technical, Shopping. Especially
| one to filter out all shopping related results.
|
| For example, if I want to learn about a country, I do not want
| any travel related stuff in my search results. On the other hand,
| if I am looking for ideas for my next holidays, throw all the
| flight, hotel, beach infos about that country at me that you
| have.
|
| Or give me a button that limits my search result to stackoverflow
| and stackexchange. Their own search engine sucks ass, so i have
| to rely on google (using "site:stackoverflow.com").
|
| Give me this and a decent search results, and you have a paying
| customer.
| simplecto wrote:
| Anyone building (or in this case, buying) a search engine takes a
| fight they cannot meaningfully make impact.
|
| 1. Privacy is a feature, not a platform. If the search engine
| cannot deliver better results than google or bing (a tall order)
| then there is no reason to use it no matter how private.
|
| 2. Google has a 20+ year head start and billions invested. You
| will not catch up playing the same game (eg - broad search).
| Google, for all its faults, is amazing technology. If you try to
| be a general search engine and compete I do not see a win.
|
| 3. Find another strategy, like BETTER search results within a
| niche. Curated by subject matter experts and enthusiasts.
|
| 4. Source your search results from trustworthy data sources. SEO
| has ruined search. Google setup the rules and the
| Black/Grey/Whitehat practitioners out-smartted them every step of
| the way. It is full of crappy data sources.
|
| 5. Curation, not scale is the key here. I don't see a win for
| Brave.
| rel2thr wrote:
| You said it yourself that SEO has ruined search. That's a HUGE
| advantage for a smaller search engine. The seo people aren't
| going to spend their time targeting a small search engine. And
| they definitely won't target it at the risk of hurting their
| Google rankings
| Kaze404 wrote:
| Excited to see how long it takes for them to be outed on yet
| another controversy, say it was "accidental" and rollback on this
| new service. Their MO is pretty clear at this point.
| e-clinton wrote:
| Headline two years from now: "Brave apologizes for breaking their
| promise on search and tracking users anyways. Promises to do
| better."
| kibwen wrote:
| It's good to see more competition in the search space, but I have
| to wonder: is Search really still the golden goose at Google?
| Between Android, Chrome, and YouTube, Google seems to have all
| the profiling data and all the eyeballs it could ever ask for.
| How wrong am I?
| rank0 wrote:
| Yes I believe search produces the lion's share of revenue for
| the company still. But yeah, all of their products/services
| work together to build a comprehensive dataset about the user.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| I still don't understand basic attention token, but I know people
| that do understand it and I support them!
| mminer237 wrote:
| Instead of showing ads on websites, Brave blocks them and has
| an option to show you ads from the browser itself. If you elect
| to see these ads, it will pay the revenue from the ads to the
| websites you use or designate. It uses a cryptocurrency called
| BAT as the medium of transferring funds.
| [deleted]
| izacus wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that Brave is also a browser which was
| silently replacing links in webpages for their affilate links to
| make a profit: https://decrypt.co/31522/crypto-brave-browser-
| redirect
|
| I don't trust their promises.
| mminer237 wrote:
| That's not true. It was never replacing links in webpages. It
| was redirecting if you typed the URL. Which, I would honestly
| be okay with. It's at no cost to me, and I understand Brave
| needs to make money. I could see how Binance would be upset,
| but not me myself. Virtually all browsers make money by search
| referrals, and I don't see how that would be different from my
| point-of-view. That seems extremely mild to me.
|
| Also, when people got upset, Brave changed it too. It's not
| like they promised to never make money. I don't see that as a
| reason to trust Brave any less. It seems like a good influence
| on the web.
| seph-reed wrote:
| For whatever reason, this never bothered me. The service wasn't
| any worse for it, I didn't really feel taken advantage of...
| technically they were part of how I might have gotten to one of
| those links.
|
| I guess there's the loss in privacy where it's known what
| browser I use, but that's not the kind of privacy loss that
| worries me.
|
| They've got to pay the bills somehow, and while they should
| have been more up-front about doing it this way, and it _is_ a
| breach of trust, it still landed in the realm of "reasonable
| asking for forgiveness" to me.
|
| > I don't trust their promises.
|
| Maybe I'm just not seeing which promise it was that was broken
| so badly.
| imiric wrote:
| > Maybe I'm just not seeing which promise it was that was
| broken so badly.
|
| The unspoken promise that web browsers should be impartial
| user agents that render the content as its authors intended,
| rather than man-in-the-middle agents that modify the content
| as they see fit.
|
| The fact this change also benefitted Brave authors directly
| is an additional breach of trust.
|
| Inexcusable in my opinion, and with the other shady
| cryptocurrency dealings mentioned in a sibling comment, it's
| enough for me to never want to use their browser or anything
| associated with them.
|
| I appreciate they're trying to change the status quo of how
| the web works and is monetized today, but they started on the
| wrong foot and their reputation is forever tarnished in my
| eyes.
| nicbou wrote:
| - It alters the content that is served to you. It violates
| the expectation that your browser is a neutral agent.
|
| - It monetises the content created by other people. As
| someone who lives off the content I create, I'd take offence
| to that, particularly if it changes already monetised links.
| jonathansampson wrote:
| > "...silently replacing links in webpages..."
|
| That's incorrect. Brave added a feature to the browser which
| would list Affiliate Links, if any, in pre-search UI. As the
| user typed something into the address-bar (e.g. 'Bitcoin'),
| Brave (the browser) would check local data to see if there were
| any relevant affiliate links. If it found one, it would
| enumerate it among the other search suggestions in the address-
| bar dropdown.
|
| Note, affiliate links were not inserted into pages. Links on
| pages were not modified. Requests en-route were not re-routed.
| There were many ways people described this feature; most of
| them were incorrect. So what was the problem?
|
| Our implementation of this feature had a mistake; it matched
| against fully-qualified URLs. As such, if you typed
| 'binance.us' into your address bar, and Brave had an affiliate
| code for that domain (which would be visibly shown before the
| user navigates), the browser sent you to the affiliate link
| instead of the non-affiliate link.
|
| When this issue was brought to our attention, we confirmed the
| (undesired) behavior, owned the mistake, fixed the issue, and
| confirmed that no revenue would be made from that affiliate
| link. Mistakes do happen in software, and they will happen with
| Brave (try as we might to avoid them). What's important is that
| we moved quickly, fixed the issue, and maintained transparency.
|
| Traffic attribution is not uncommon in browsers though; open
| Firefox and type something in your address bar. When you hit
| Enter, you'll find that Firefox adds a traffic-attribution
| token to the URL too (although they do this only after the
| request is being issued; Brave showed the token before
| navigation).
|
| I hope this helps provide a bit of context to a very
| misunderstood bug in Brave's past.
| f430 wrote:
| The fact that they raised money through ICO and issued coins on
| a dubious blockchain just compounds to the suspicion.
|
| I am using Firefox and I trust Mozilla more than I trust Bravo.
| christophergs wrote:
| Eich (Brave CEO) co-founded Mozilla, FYI
| TheNorthman wrote:
| And Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia, doesn't mean we
| should trust him.
| f430 wrote:
| Bernie Madoff was also a philanthropist.
| SwimSwimHungry wrote:
| Sure, but it's probably a good thing he's not at Mozilla
| now, because he would have also pulled Firefox down the
| same path Brave has gone with micropayments using BATs,
| which isn't exactly uncontroversial.
|
| See the Tom Scott and BAT incident. Kinda shady how it was
| handled.
| meibo wrote:
| Mind that there also is a reason why Brendan Eich is no
| longer at Mozilla.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26868536
| mminer237 wrote:
| It might be controversial, but I still think Mozilla
| would be in a better place today if Eich was still in
| charge.
| knz_ wrote:
| The entire development team would have walked if he
| stayed. Nobody wants to work with someone who hasn't done
| anything technically relevant in 30 years and can't seem
| to stop pushing his far-right views in places where they
| are irrelevant.
|
| Just a few weeks ago he went on an anti-Fauci and anti-
| mask conspiracy rant in the thread about him appearing on
| Lex Fridman's podcast, when nobody was even discussing
| politics.
| paulcarroty wrote:
| Firefox sends telemetry to Google servers:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1165858896176660480.html
| bhaile wrote:
| They did address it as an error on their part.
| [https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/06/09/brave-ceo-
| apolog...]
| flatline wrote:
| "An error in judgment". That's kind of like, I'm sorry we got
| caught. The fact they thought something this was a good idea
| at all is telling.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| No, it was a bug, the refcode was supposed to go only on
| keywords (as all browsers do).
|
| And contrary to upthread, we never "replaced links in web
| pages".
| kmos wrote:
| I am good with ecosia.org ;-)
| samstave wrote:
| I use BRave exclusively on both my machines and my mobile
| devices.
|
| I have one request within brave:
|
| I want "Use Profiles" a switchable profile that states what I am
| using Brave for - and session states.
|
| So let me explain:
|
| 1. I am using brave to do personal browsing at home and thus my
| 30 open tabs are related to my personal browsing etc.
|
| A cool way of implementing this would be instead of CTRL+SHIFT+N
| would be CTRL+SHIFT+N[1-9] to shift to VIEW and would take me to
| that tab-stack... and there would be a page that would allow me
| to manage each tab-stack around [TOPIC] - Meta Book marks...
|
| 2. Educational tabs (bookmarks) associated with learning
| something - so I want tab grouping/session grouping around the
| resources I read for learning a topic
|
| 3. Work topics - so a group of resources related to work.
|
| 4. To sum up the above, basically VIEWS that I can dictate what
| bookmarks, sites, resources, etc relate to which view.
|
| Kind of like multiple desktops - I want sep viewing environs that
| allow me to group, classify and segment knowledge tunnels... and
| overlap them as desired.
|
| Love Brave.
| digitalbase wrote:
| I use 1tab for this. works in Brave and Chrome
| samizdis wrote:
| > 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.'"
| topspin wrote:
| I'd love to be able to filter out, for instance, pinterest.
|
| 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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > and thought police
|
| Copyright interests pay large cash to make sure you know is
| truly best for you. You could show a little gratitude.
| topspin wrote:
| Indeed. I'll keep that in mind.
| samizdis wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-remove-
| pinteres...
| depingus wrote:
| You can just add -site:pinterest.com in DuckDuckGo. I think
| you can do the same in Google.
| topspin wrote:
| I'm well aware of the various search flags. I can also
| think of at least 10 domains I'd like to permanently
| obviate from every search. Adding flags for all of these
| every time is unwieldy. I have toyed with browser
| extensions to achieve this, but I quickly learned that
| using many of these flags will compromise search results. A
| good solution will require a search engine that anticipates
| this use case.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| Me too -- most image searches need a "-pinterest" term added.
| ffpip wrote:
| google.*##.g:has(a[href*=".pinterest."])
| google.*##a[href*=".pinterest."]:nth-ancestor(1)
|
| Add to uBlock Origin 'My Filters' Section :)
| ceh123 wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://hadal.io
| BrendanEich wrote:
| Turing _incomplete_. Thanks, will get a correction to the
| reporter.
| BrendanEich wrote:
| Fixed. Thanks again.
| [deleted]
| sadfev wrote:
| Brendan Eich is doing some very important work. I hope this
| succeeds!
| [deleted]
| pmurt7 wrote:
| There was this wonderful podcast featuring Eich a few days ago:
|
| "Brendan Eich: JavaScript, Firefox, Mozilla, and Brave"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE
| not_knuth wrote:
| There was quite a discussion on HN about the podcast joined by
| Brendan Eich himself:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131043
| desireco42 wrote:
| I am really impressed with Brave team work, they are spearheading
| work that pushes web forward, kind of what Mozilla was supposed
| to do.
|
| I really love ipfs work they did and completely ready that not
| everything will pan out.
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