Brave’s Payment Spec
Marshall T. Rose and Brendan Eich (Hacker News, Slashdot):
We know and respect that content on the Internet is largely advertiser supported, so our goal is not to remove advertising, but to put you back in control. Our architecture to do just that is – no surprise – an inversion of the traditional browser advertisement model. The traditional model treats the browser as a “silent partner”. You are tracked by multiple third parties as you browse across different sites. Those parties build sophisticated (yet annoyingly incomplete) profiles in private clouds, and then some party (often distinct from the tracker) serves ads based on those profiles.
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So, in Brave’s anti-cloud model, all of your detailed information is kept only in the browser. […] When non-intrusive ad slots are detected, the Brave Browser contacts the Brave Ad Network and requests ads to fill those slots. The Brave Browser maps browsing history to a fixed set of general “interest” categories. A subset of those categories are combined with categories based on the context of the current page and possibly some “decoy” categories. No other information is disclosed and no unique or persistent identifiers are used. The Brave Browser then selects appropriate ads to display from the list returned by the Brave Ad Network and either ignores the remainder or caches them for later use.
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Today we are discussing the Brave Ledger, a Bitcoin-based micropayments system for users and publishers.
Previously: Brave Browsers.
Update (2016-04-14): Nick Heer:
While technically true, Brave treads awfully close to an uncomfortable line previously drawn by content framing and JavaScript injection.
