The Weekly BAT + Podcast ep. 11 (Oct. 11, 2019) — Brave R&D Team unveils zkSense, a novel privacy-preserving mechanism for bot detection in smartphones (blog), Dr Johnny Ryan makes a submission to the UK Competition & Markets Authority (blog), Brave now supports IPFS!
Welcome to this week’s BAT Community Update! Thank you to Dan Murphy for his contributions!
Blog: Brave’s R&D team unveils zkSense, a novel privacy-preserving mechanism for bot detection in smartphones
In this blogpost, we present zkSENSE: a novel privacy-preserving mechanism for bot detection in smartphones. zkSENSE leverages device sensors, such as the gyroscope and accelerometer, to measure the device’s moving patterns, while either a human or a bot is interacting with an app on the device. This way, zkSENSE can infer whether specific actions in an app (e.g., click/type events) were carried out by a human or a bot with high accuracy even when there are artificial device movements (i.e., device placed on a swinging cradle). To preserve the privacy of the user, zkSENSE does not transfer potentially sensitive sensor data to a remote server. Instead, zkSENSE uses zero-knowledge proofs to demonstrate to a remote server that an action was carried out by a human without revealing any additional information.
Read the full post here: https://brave.com/zksense-a-privacy-preserving-mechanism-for-bot-detection-in-mobile-devices/
Blog: Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave & Dr Orla Lynskey of the London School of Economics make a submission to the UK Competition & Markets Authority outlining significant digital market problems
The UK Government Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) is examining online platforms and the digital advertising market. Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, and Dr Orla Lynskey of the London School of Economics have made a submission to the CMA that outlines significant market problems.
Dominant digital companies use their position of market power to create “cascading monopolies”. They do this in part by cross-using data for purposes beyond what the data was initially collected for. This offensive leveraging of data avoids the need to compete in each new domain on the merits.
These firms also use their position to extract amounts of data from individuals beyond what might be considered a fair or reasonable exchange. The digital industry’s data excess norm is similar to the banking industry’s credit excess norm that precipitated the financial crisis. It incentivizes a shadow economy based on unnecessary and insecure data processing.
Read the full post here: https://brave.com/uk-cma/