The Weekly BAT + Podcast Ep. 32 (March 9, 2020) — Binance now verified with Brave Rewards, Brave’s new anti-fingerprinting tech makes it the strongest anti-fingerprinting browser, Brave scores most private browser in study by Trinity College Dublin professor
Binance Twitter is now verified!
Binance, one of the world’s top exchanges, has verified their Twitter account with Brave Rewards! Adoption of Brave Rewards continues to surge, with 450,000 creators/websites now verified. Who remembers when it was less than 10,000?
https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/fa15jp/cnet_brave_browser_partners_with_wayback_machine/
Brave’s new fingerprint scrambling feature gives it the strongest anti-fingerprinting technology of any mainstream browser
Brave is releasing a new form of browser fingerprinting protection, available today in our Nightly version. These new protections both provide the strongest fingerprinting protections of any popular browser, and work without introducing bothersome permission prompts or breaking websites, including against the powerful fingerprintJS fingerprinter.
Brave’s approach differs from existing fingerprinting protection tools by randomizing fingerprintable values in ways that are imperceptible to humans, but which confuse fingerprints. As trackers switch from traditional cookie based tracking to fingerprinting, having practical and effective fingerprinting protections will be an increasingly important way to maintaining a user serving, privacy-respecting Web.
https://brave.com/whats-brave-done-for-my-privacy-lately-episode3/
BAT/Brave in the News
Brave beats other browsers in privacy study
Users looking for a privacy-focused browser might want to consider Brave first, according to a study published this week.
Douglas Leith, professor of computer systems at Trinity University, examined six browsers for his report – Web Browser Privacy: What Do Browsers Say When They Phone Home? He found that Brave’s Chromium-based browser is the least likely to reveal unique identifying information about the computer using it.
Read the full text here: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/02/27/brave-beats-other-browsers-in-privacy-study/
How to stop using Google if you don’t agree with the terms of service
Brave browser doesn’t use trackers. By its own claim (and the anecdotal claims of others), it loads web pages faster and doesn’t collect data on your browsing activity.
It also comes with in-built security features to keep you safer online, and has its own currency that allows you to contribute to the websites you like so they can stay in business.
News You Should Know
Here’s the File Clearview AI Has Been Keeping on Me, and Probably on You Too
We used the California Consumer Privacy Act to see what information the controversial facial recognition company has collected on me.
Big Tech Is Testing You – Large-scale social experiments are now ubiquitous, and conducted without public scrutiny
Luca and Bazerman focus on a new breed of large-scale social experiments, the power of which has already been demonstrated in the public sector. As they note, governments have used experiments to find better ways to get their citizens to pay taxes on time, say, or to donate organs after death. N.G.O.s have successfully deployed experiments in developing countries to test the effects of everything from tampons to textbooks. The impact of a simple experiment can be dramatic, particularly in monetary terms.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/02/big-tech-is-testing-you
Brave Team Tweets
Brave is enabling DNS over HTTPS. It’s coming.
@DugganJared @NP_tokumei @alex_wykoff @BraveSampson @brave We’re enabling DoH by default if the user is already using a provider that supports it (e.g. Cloudflare, Google). That’s the chromium plan and no change in threat model. I don’t see how we can foist this on all users. The counterargument is their ISPs may foist worse resolvers. Feb 27 2020
What does Brendan mean by “yet”?
@WeedifyM @MarsT18318663 @AttentionToken Standard iOS place for it, so yeah, weird ;-). See @codebycoffee reply for typing words in address bar way, much better. Voice search requires search service, etc. Not us (yet).
Imagine a feature where you could export all your Chrome data to Brave…
@TsundokuSensei @jason_kint @johnwilander @pbannist Don’t have one yet, but @jsecretan may guess soon. Remember ETA is spelled g u e s s. Feb 27 2020
Private sync for all the things (history and more).
@kaushalyapr @brave Yes, new plan should bring private (user has only encryption key) sync for all the data types: history, passwords, bookmarks, etc. Topic of work week right now.
What do you think about Brave blocking 1st party ads?
@acfou @brave We can definitively block all promoted tweets if the user sets the forthcoming option. Mar 02 2020
We could do crowdsourced blocking, but why not block everything instead?
@seanbohan @fharper @brave This is another adversarial game to play, but could do. Better to give users an option to block all. Mar 02 2020
Donate the BATs! Luke and others are doing this… why not you?
Luke Mulks | lukemulks.eth@lukemulks
Pledging some $bat for @khanacademy this time! Can’t say it enough; love that @samlustgarten is making a habit of showing how people can #GiveBAT with @brave + @AttentionToken. @BAT_Community https://t.co/2D2lGNWIRd
Johnny giving praise where it’s due.
@BrendanEich @brave @seanblanchfield @RaviNa1k Throughout this campaign at @Brave the focus has been to fix the RTB problem, and work in the interest of people and publishers. No better ally than the great @jason_kint. We want to build a sustainable, safe, system for media companies and advertisers. Mar 02 2020
Brave and Brendan are helping Johnny fight the good fight.
Our campaign, to end the largest data breach ever recorded, continues. It could not have started without @BrendanEich and @Brave. https://t.co/PRIKYLVuFH https://t.co/VQOoazR1AL Mar 02 2020
Google is looking to spread its data across the entire business.
In the same vein, Google’s dialogue (click ‘more options’ when using a non business account) reveals the exfiltration of publishers’ audience data to Google, for Google to use across its entire business. https://t.co/N3JIrCSnOI Feb 28 2020
Roaring Fans
@LeeFlower I’d like to recommend @brave browser. It’s an ad and tracker blocker based on Chrome that is trying to push the idea that we should be paid for viewing the ads, and that payment should be passed onto the content creators we find good. Mar 05 2020
@progressvoice Dude I use @brave Browser. It’s @Google Chrome without the Googleness! 😉 Mar 05 2020
From Reddit:
Shit’s fast. There you go, that’s my sole reason for using Brave https://reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/fbw3rg/shits_fast_there_you_go_thats_my_sole_reason_for/
FINALLY! Made the switch.
Client Updates
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v1.4.96
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v1.5.108
https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v1.6.58
