Google Brave Battles amid growing demand for privacy

Google Brave Battles amid growing demand for privacy

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The Brave privacy browser created a Google competitor

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 flagship search engine with its latest acquisition. But the timing could have been better.

Announced yesterday, Brave bought the search engine Tailcat, which will serve as the basis for Brave Search, an alternative to Google search that does not track the search habits of its users. Unlike most search engines, Tailcat’s product is based on an independent search index and does not collect IP addresses or use personally identifiable information to target search results. “Brave will also explore options based on blockchain and new developments, including for use in e-commerce,” says the announcement.

Unfortunately, the news came on the same day that Google announced that it will stop building and using tracking tools used to deliver targeted advertising, starting next year. While this could be a big win for privacy advocates, smaller companies that don’t have their own proprietary data sources can be at a disadvantage.

“Google is trying to crawl the web on a course that still favors its infrastructure and advantages,” said Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave, in an email to Forbes. “Before others can push things towards a more radical and user-focused approach. Eich is known as the creator of the JavaScript programming language and co-founder of Mozilla, the parent company of Firefox.

According to Eich, the search giant is running to keep up with technological and industry developments. “Brave, DuckDuckGo, Apple

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, and many others, have business models that do not depend on the types of opaque, real-time systems that Google has been successful in, ”he writes. “Anyone who cares about a web that really prioritizes privacy should be concerned if Google makes people say ‘privacy is no cross-site tracking’.”

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Brave, based in San Francisco, was founded in 2015 with the mission of providing web users with a faster and safer browsing experience with a focus on protecting privacy. In 2017, the company raised $ 35 million in about 30 seconds through an initial coin offering, bringing the total amount raised to $ 42 million.

Brave’s web browser, which currently has more than 25 million active users per month and more than 1 million verified publishers, blocks ads and data capture trackers and offers rewards in the form of Primary Care Tokens (BAT) with based on the attention that users pay to the sites they visit, which can be exchanged for a currency of their choice. Brave says his advertisers are getting, on average, a 9% click-through rate for their campaigns, compared to the industry’s 2% average.

The demand for data privacy is increasing. In January, the private messaging platform Signal saw a 62-fold increase in the number of users after a controversial update to rival WhatsApp’s privacy policy, according to a Reuters report. At the same time, another encrypted messaging application, Telegram, has exceeded 500 million active users globally.

“In the beginning, primary users are essential, but as the benefits of privacy become obvious, the demand for privacy expands to growing circles of users. We heard users saying that they would never return to the invasive tools they used before, once they switched to privacy solutions by design, ”says Eich. “It’s like quitting smoking.”

Brave Search is the latest addition to the company’s suite of privacy preservation products, including a news reader, Brave Today, a Firewall + VPN service and an advertising platform, Brave Ads, which delivered nearly 3,000 private advertising campaigns across 200 countries with advertisers like Verizon

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, PayPal and Amazon

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. The private video conferencing service is also under construction.

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