This might be true.
> In fact, they don't even have the ability to access it...
This is clearly false on the face of it. Obviously the browser has access to the browsing history.
Brave claims on https://brave.com/hc-privacy/ that "When Brave Ads launches later this year, all personal data and browsing history will remain on-device and will not be transmitted to Brave or anyone else.". This implies that they will use personal data and browsing history, but attempt to anonymize it in some unspecified manner before selling it. Of course, as Netflix can attest, this is much harder than it sounds, and I highly doubt that Brave is up to the task.
My buddy's brother worked for them, and we each made a couple hundred bucks before it went out of business.
Tl;dr people gamed the system to make a ton of money, and advertisers realized people weren't actually looking at or clicking the ads.
What people think they like, and how they behave don't always correlate. Especially when it comes to spending money.
Data gathered measuring actual user behavior will always be miles ahead of filled in questionnaires.
Also it is information the user voluntarily gives up which is also a big difference.
That's all fun and games, as long as you realize that all browser-extensions capture your keypresses, all data on all pages, and et cetera. All browser extensions see everything you do, and everything you type, and et cetera.
Browser extensions are subject to a permissions system, just like apps. Their code is also fully visible to you, and fully sandboxed.
The only real danger to extensions right now is that they can auto-update without a user review, and thus can "turn evil". It's happened to a handful of popular extensions (eg. Stylish).
Requiring the user to manually update extensions has its own share of problems though, so I'm not even sure if I disagree with browsers makers decision to auto-update.
But the claim that "all extensions are keyloggers" is just blatant nonsense.
Ad blockers for iOS don't capture any data. They work by creating a JSON file that is processed by Safari to tell which patterns to block.
- Users sign up to an ad network and they insert all information about themselves, the more, the better.
- They are periodically prompted to add or update their data (like facebook asking you if you're still living in the same city).
- An adblock-like browser extension, replaces all ads they see with the own network's ads, which are highly targeted, and hence get much more money than regular ads for the ad network.
- The ad network is setup as a non-profit foundation which pipes all the revenue into donations to institutions doing work related to privacy initiatives (EFF and similar).
- Users are shown how much money their willingful lack of privacy has generated for privacy initiatives.
It's a play on using the argument of "I have nothing to hide" in order to advance actual privacy legislation and protections. If someone builds this, I'd sign up and use it.