Member-only story
Can the Brave Browser Fix the Internet?
The age of privacy breaches and data harvesting won’t last forever
You don’t need to have watched Netflix’s The Great Hack to know that the simple novelty of “surfing the web” has begun to wear off. If you did watch it, you would have been served a chilling reminder of just how much information about you is floating around in cyberspace, collected and sold by the corporate titans of the modern age: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Alibaba. In the midst of the 2016 general election, Cambridge Analytica boasted that it had 5,000 pieces of data on every single adult in the United States — enough to predict exactly how each would vote.
By now, the Machiavellian exploits of Cambridge Analytica and Russian hackers are well documented — but the 2016 fireworks are a symptom of the problem, not its cause. The unfathomable amount of data that we’ve provided Big Tech, used by malicious actors to manipulate and divide, hasn’t vanished. Why would it? Facebook and Google have built their businesses around the harvesting and monetizing of your information. It’s just a pity that they haven’t proven to be particularly diligent custodians of their collections — 50 million users here, 50 million users there.
At a time when the great Silicon Valley companies have rushed to monopolize this new data economy with the enthusiasm of Victorian gold miners, it’s noteworthy to see a new entrant propose a reimagining of the system itself. This new technology company, aptly named Brave, promotes a browser that is fundamentally built around privacy and data security. The Brave browser blocks ads, cookies, and trackers by default. Brave prioritizes secure connections (think HTTPS instead of HTTP) and promises to block all phishing and malware.
Brave pointedly says “we’re not in the personal data business.”
For the curious, Brave also offers a feature that lets you view the tracking devices that each website tries to attach to you, in real time. After only a cursory scroll through YouTube, I noticed that Brave blocked 23 different cross-site trackers within 10 seconds, some from Google and YouTube but others from indecipherable locations in the deep web. Brave claims that blocking all these tracking scripts…
