Brave Browser

• https://basicattentiontoken.org/growth
• https://bravebat.info

Congrats 🙏🥰.

First of all my approval does only reflect my personal opinion regarding the subject privacy and search engine.

It is not meant to bash or discredit Braves work here. I point my concerns out, not more not less. END.

• Brave Search Premium is 3$ a month, Brave intends to implement Brave Rewards into Brave Search sometime in mid 2022. If you pay premium you "Get a cleaner view on all results pages", which means those that don't won't get cleaner page results. Brave Search is currently not displaying any ads in their Beta period, but the free version of Brave Search will soon be ad-supported. Brave Search will also offer an ad-free premium version in the near future, it is unclear if you can, similar like with Talk, use your Rewards to unlock the premium version or not.
• Brave Search Uses Click Data in Search Ranking Algorithm which is controversial. However, I found no evidence for nor against it. My first research on this subject was that the censorship, mentioned below is maybe caused or invoked by this.
• ~~Brave Search censorship - original source - is even worse than Google Search censorship.~~Brendan Eich says that thy do not censor.
• Brave Search requires you to solve a Captcha behind a VPN or Tor, the thing here is that they trying to protect attacks like DOS so this is not easy to solve, StartPage has similar issue.
• Amazon is used as their CA. Brave uses Amazon Cloudfront as their CDN, meaning all traffic passes through Amazon servers. CDNs itself are more than controversial. CDN usage violating GDPR according to Munich State Court, but this does not entirely conduct that CDNs in general are not illegal.
• Brave access your IP address upon your visit to determine your location and better serve you ads. While they claim to not store IP addresses, unlike DDG and Startpage, they do read your full IP address which is not private.
• Brave Search is still beta, which means that since October 2021, Brave Search was declared the default search engine for the Brave browser users in the US, Canada, UK (replacing Google Search), France (replacing Qwant) and Germany (replacing DuckDuckGo and Ecosia).

Most problems are fixable but maybe not all, some depend on the business model and protection mechanism. For example my idea was to e.g. unlock Search Premium with your BATs, this way you can support Brave, use your BATs for good and you do not need to use other payment system if you already use the crypto stuff. Other things can be changed or alternatives could be used, instead of Amazon just self-host your own, which is an option if Brave gets bigger, so you do not depend on infrastructure of others + zero-trust reasons.

I contacted Brave regarding this matter via Twitter but got no answer - so far.

Please do not abuse my findings, this thread and my info to smear Brave or post it without my consent and permission in other forums, that would create unnecessary hate, Brave Search is still beta, as I mentioned above.

Give the Brave Team enough time to respond on a professional manner.