Brave Payments is a payment system that allows Brave to truly anonymize the data associated with your browsing. This means that Brave does not know which Bitcoin wallet is associated with the lists of sites that you choose to support. In other words - you, the user, have access to your browsing report but Brave (the company) does not have that information.
Brave Payments is more than an anonymization service. It is also the system that does payment reconciliation (makes sure that payments are processed correctly and securely).
No, you do not have to pay Brave to go ad-free, as we have a complimentary ad-free mode. We do encourage users to support publishers and their favorite sites via our paid ad-free mode, but welcome all user profiles to Brave.
None, except for the unlinkable and optional step by a user who verifies their Brave wallet in order to receive payments. They would then need to create an account through our partner BitGo - in that case information such as email and phone number is collected and stored by BitGo in order to authorize your wallet.
Brave Payments uses a technology called Anonize that permits anonymous-but-accountable transactions. Here's an analogy from the real world: someone walks into a polling place, identifies themselves, and gets a ballot and an envelope. They go into a voting booth, mark the ballot, put the ballot in the envelope, and seal it. They then drop the envelope in a ballot box. The people running the polling place and counting the ballots know that each person putting an envelope in the ballot box is authorized to vote, but they aren't able to determine which envelope in the ballot box goes with which person. In the case of anonize, a special branch of cryptography called "Zero Knowledge Proofs" are used to get the same functionality.
We block trackers, that’s a big win compared to the status quo. We also block eyesore ads that won’t be replaced (think of those parasite pictures in image grids at the bottom of pages). We currently replace only certain standard-sized ads, and we aim for higher quality than what would have been served in those spaces. So we reduce the total number of ads experienced by the user and increase the quality and relevance, while simultaneously blocking trackers that follow your activity across sites.
There are two parts to that model, filter rules and business deals. Take the second first:
No, we block without reference to any business relationships, and our brand value depends on us doing so. We will not take “pay to play” money from advertisers or publishers, or extort publishers with blocking threats. Our goal is to make better revenue for all publishers, and give users better ads and control of their data.
Extensions face API and performance limits. Our own browser lets us put our best foot forward on speed and deep integration of private ad-tech. We may do extensions if our users find themselves browsing in other browsers often.
We were, under a partially sandboxed, multi-process architecture called Graphene. But we did a careful head-to-head comparison and by every measure, Electron/chromium won. We wish Mozilla well, but as a startup, we must use all sound leverage available to us. For web compatibility and in particular Chrome compatibility, this means chromium.
We use all-open source, and we welcome help in auditing our source and verifying our binaries on Debian Linux (verified binaries provably derive from a given version of open source). See https://brendaneich.com/2014/01/trust-but-verify/ for more on verified builds.
Beyond this lower-level auditing, we will need partners to believe in our anonymous ad attribution and conversion confirmation system. More on this as we build it out in near-term milestones on the road to Brave 1.0.
BitGo for Bitcoin wallets and identity services. Fastly for edge caching of ads and our site content.
We’re still developing the system, now entirely in the open source on github.com, but at this point we know we will use BTC only for permissionless payment delivery to user and publisher wallets that we will create using BitGo’s APIs. We hope to keep funds in BTC only in monthly payment buffers, to reduce effects of volatility. We intend to let expert users “bring their own BTC” to self-fund their wallets and auto-micropay for as much of their browsing as they like.
We intend to when multiple partners in different regions have helped shake it out. It’s a capital mistake to standardize prematurely, so we must first innovate, deploy, and learn.
With blocking enabled, most standard ad sizes will be blocked/replaced. Users have the options to turn off both ad blocking and ad replacement. We intend to work with publishers to enable display of their direct-sold inventory and provide access to our private targeting system.
Our browser-inserted ads will come from ad agencies and our direct partners. We have several advantages over traditional channels:
As mentioned above, the browser knows almost everything you do. It knows what sites you visit, how much time you spend on them, what you look at, what is visible “above the fold” and not occluded by opaque layers, what searches you make, what groups of tabs you open while researching major purchases, etc.
Only the browser, after HTTPS terminates and secure pages are decrypted, has all of your private data needed to analyze user intent. Our auditable open source browser code protects this intent data on the client device. Our server side has no access to this data in the clear, nor does it have decryption keys. We do not run a MitM proxy or VPN service.
We provide signals to the browser to help it make good decisions about what preferences and intent signals to expose to maximize user, publisher and advertiser value. Each ad request is anonymous, and exposes only a small subset of the user's preferences and intent signals to prevent "fingerprinting" the user by a possibly unique set of tags.
The vault generates a UUID upon connection from your first Brave install on a laptop or smartphone. This UUID will be shared across devices so you can pair devices without a login system, using just a QR code or similar. The browser supplies a public key for authentication of this anonymous identity. Everything else inside the vault is encrypted by a browser-generated key that we have no access to.
The Brave Vault can hold information that users would like to sync across devices such as bookmarks, passwords, etc. -- but only with user permission to sync this data. It also holds the combined, anonymized cross-device browser history captured by the browser. The user can access any of this information and has complete control over what is stored. The vault is not connected to any PII, email, username, etc.
We hope to aggregate anonymized data across browsers to help improve the in-browser targeting engine, but Brave cannot receive cleartext data from any single user/device.
While we will block third-party cookies where you have no first-party relationship with the cookie’s domain, we don't block first party cookies by default. However, the Brave user will have the option to selectively block/enable cookies globally or on a site-by-site basis. Google will only have the ability to track you within their own domain and they won't be able to use that information to target you outside of google.com.
Our plan for the future includes allowing publishers to signal the browser in real-time when they have direct-sold ads that are worth more than what Brave can provide. The ads must be relevant and meet our general quality standards (non-intrusive, no trackers, etc…), but this determination will be made dynamically and will never involve any whitelisting fees. The goal is to maximize value while protecting user privacy and control. The user will always have the option to “downvote” an ad regardless of its source.
As earlier answers explain, we do not even have access to identifiable user data. The anonymized aggregated ad campaign related data we do collect is used for accounting and reporting, but this data cannot be mapped back to devices or user identities of any kind.
The new Brave browser blocks the ads and trackers that slow you down, spend your bandwidth, and invade your privacy. Then we put clean ads back, to fund website owners and Brave users alike. Users can spend their funds to go ad-free on their favorite sites.
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