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Mozilla Co-Founder's Ad-blocking Brave Browser Will Pay You Bitcoin To See Ads (pcworld.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Brave, a new privacy and speed focused web browser for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, backed by Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich, will pay its users in bitcoin to watch ads. From a PCWorld article, 'Under this plan, advertisers pay for a certain number of impressions, and Brave aggregates those payments into one sum. Websites that participate in the scheme get 55 percent of the money, weighted by how many impressions are served on their sites. For both users and publishers, Brave deposits the money into individual bitcoin wallets, and both parties must verify their identity to claim the funds. This requires an email and phone number for users, and more stringent identification steps for publishers. Users who don't verify will automatically donate their share of the funds back to the sites they visit most.' It appears Brave's strategy hinges on, among other things, collecting your browsing data to display relevant ads. The aforementioned article also says that users will have an option to block all ads by paying a monthly subscription to Brave. Not sure how many people would want to buy that.
i'll bite. still won't watch the ads, though.
I'm not enabling the ability to see ads for the sake of bitcoins when doing so is a potential avenue for malware. You want to vet the advertisers and take on full liability in case of wrongdoing then maybe I'll consider it.
Why does this parse as "scam" to me?
What exactly would I, a "subscriber," be subscribing to? "Look at all this lovely personally identifiable data we've collected. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it..." Yeah, the word "subscription" doesn't properly describe that kind of transaction...
And what's to prevent me from launching a phalanx of Brave browsers and have them randomly surfing the Web and accumulating Bitcoin for watcching ad impressions? Sockpuppetry is still trivial. Hell, why would I need to use the Brave browser at all; I could just emulate the protocol and then install the client on millions of compromised Windows machines...
This strikes me as really goddamned dumb...
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Personally I find it hard to quantify how much money I should be paid to face the greater risk of malware infection. I value my data and time very highly, so it's unlikely they could pay me enough.
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I had to put an ad blocker on a Windows computer the other day, because YOUTUBE pushed an ad that said "One of your drivers is outdated", localized in our language. It was not emulating Windows dialogs, but to an untrained user looked like some sort of system prompt anyway which might have lead to crapware or adware be installed, but could as well be a tech support scam.
The ad scared me, so I thought the end user didn't deserve to be used like that. Another ad somewhere may have told him he had a virus (you used to laugh that crap off ten years ago, but well)
I suppose the alternative could be that I design and write a three-month crash course about computers (starting with "the computer has a CPU, memory and I/O. The CPU runs a programme made of machine language instructions.."), Windows and the Internet. Then teach the course over monthes, and evaluate my friend.
Or take one minute to install an ad blocker. (and very few other tasks, such as reversing the free antivirus's decision to lock itself, and unpinning the blue E from the task bar)
So a privacy-focused browser has code specifically written to send all your browsing history to a wide variety of third parties? Something's wrong there...
In order to receive the payments, the browser requires that you register three things: a bitcoin wallet [otherwise you won't get paid] an email address and a phone number. In the small print you can bet that you are signing away permission for this company to "sell on" your activity data. How would you like to be plagued by telephone marketing? Worse, the way this is going to work is by use of things like session cookies, because this browser is going to need to have a way of identifying itself to participating infrastructure. What this does is "expand the identity attributes" [i.e. add to the vectors] by which you can be identified as a real person. This is very much like that ultrasonic audio trick that was recently banned [that allowed a smartphone app to figure out what channel and what TV commercials you were watching]. In other words, you are giving away FAR, FAR more than just the time and intrusion that these ads will cost you. Seriously, don't do it.