And Brave is more than just a "fork."
I believe this.
I'd like to understand how, exactly, moving from a non-profit foundation's browser to a for-profit corporation's fork of that browser with a built in ad marketplace is a net win for my privacy. That seems like a net loss: the incentive is now to make money off of me, and the browser is actually running non-website code with that goal in mind.
* Machine learning for ads is done locally; can't be evil
* Trackers and third party ads are blocked.
When is FireFox going to block third party ads and trackers?
> * Machine learning for ads is done locally; can't be evil
There are too many moving pieces to this to dissect in a single comment. But to roughly sum them up: just about every adtech company that promises "privacy preserving targeted advertising" via ML uses some information-theoretical definition of privacy that doesn't align with normal user's intuitions about the word "private." We saw this with k-anonymity schemes, and we'll see it again when these schemes attract more scrutiny.
And on top of that: Brave's own site implies that local ad ML is currently opt-in only[2].
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...
I see the part about trackers. What about ads? Does it also block YouTube ads? That's a really nice feature built into Brave.
> just about every adtech company that promises "privacy preserving targeted advertising" via ML
The difference here is it happens in the browser. Does ML happen in Chrome?
> Brave's own site implies that local ad ML is currently opt-in only
Your reading of that isn't correct. The opt in is for ads. And local machine learning comes along with opting in.
Ads are the way the internet can be funded. For most free sites, they need to either be subsidized by another income (see say a personal website that you host yourself - you pay for the domain and hosting if it's not local). Or by either selling a product (see many software companies), or lastly by using ads (see YouTube, Vimeo, and numerous other video sharing sites)
I understand targeted ads being a nuisance and vehemently despise the datamining that supports said systems. But ads in general aren't an evil until they obfuscate the core material of a site. When you block ads, especially on YouTube for creators who use the platform to attract ads and sell their content then you prevent people who've worked to supply their income. If your issue is the ethics that are at odds with Alphabet and the privacy concerns, your fight is with your government to restrict them, Alphabet's own trackers (which you can work towards disabling).
I’ve also contributed a significant amount to an open source developer on GitHub directly through Brave.