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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla [soylentnews.org], has released a beta version [github.com] of a privacy-oriented [brave.com] Web browser based on Chromium:

At Brave, we're building a solution designed to avert [an ad-blocking] war and give users the fair deal they deserve for coming to the Web to browse and contribute. We are building a new browser and a connected private cloud service with anonymous ads. Today we're releasing the 0.7 developer version for early adopters and testers, along with open source and our roadmap.

Brave browsers block everything: initial signaling/analytics scripts that start the programmatic advertising "dirty pipe", impression-tracking pixels, and ad-click confirmation signals. By default Brave will insert ads only in a few standard-sized spaces. We find those spaces via a cloud robot (so users don't have to suffer, even a few canaries per screen size-profile, with ad delays and battery draining). We will target ads based on browser-side intent signals phrased in a standard vocabulary, and without a persistent user id or highly re-identifiable cookie.

Coverage at The Register [theregister.co.uk]:

Rather than simply acting as an ad blocker, the company hopes to provide a more nuanced approach. It recognizes that many websites are reliant on advertising in order to provide their content for free, so it is planning to utilize a user's browsing history to fit them into standard advertising segments – and then provide that segment information to websites and advertisers.

The idea is that advertisers will still be able to reach users but they won't have the same depth of information on an individual user. Nor will Brave. The result, in theory, is greater control over privacy and none of those ads for products you recently looked at that make you feel as though you are being watched.

Of course, to make that approach work, Brave would act as a gatekeeper and take a cut of the ad money, which is what would fund the company. The company hasn't said how much of a cut it would ask for and of course, the entire approach requires that there be a significant number of Brave users. To be viable, the company would need to become more popular than Opera (with 1.5 per cent of the browser market) and on a par with Safari (3.7 per cent). And that means between five to ten million users.

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