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nroach | 3 years ago

> Ad-free premium search is already an option with Brave Search

Is the premium search ad-free in the sense that no user-derived data is utilized or extractable for advertising purposes?

Or is it ad free in the sense that no ads are displayed to premium tier users, but user data can still be an input for ad measurement, conversion, and modeling?

discuss

BrendanEich|3 years ago

Brave search is private in no-user-identification and no-reidentification-via-record-unlinkability senses always, both legs: we do not build user profiles. As with all engines, we learn from head of query log and what link is clicked. That is an essential first party purpose, but we collect no personal data because nothing is linkable across queries and clicks to any person.

If you opt into the Web Discovery Project (it's off by default and a separate setting; only in Brave), then your queries and clicks across all navigation are turned into anonymous data by dropping any with enough entropy to suspect they bear personal data, dropping IP and headers, and otherwise ensuring record-unlinkability. See

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...

and

https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project/blob/main/mod....

Because Premium Brave Search has no ads, it's not useful _per se_ for ad measurement, conversion, or modeling. But I took your question do mean "do premium search queries and outbound link clicks feed into the search engine?" -- they do. But no ads, and no way to model directly how an ad would perform, beyond the big data benefit that all search engine use to help ad sales and matching.

Last thing: with off-by-default (opt-in) Brave Rewards user ads (push => new tab on click), the matching agent is in the browser, inactive until opt-in, off upon opt-out, and you can clear its history. Confirmations and revenue shares via Chaumian blind signature protocol (Privacy Pass uses same crypto alg). No server-side ad matching at all. Same for Brave News (for ads and all feeds, everything).

With search ads, matching is server-side (after the edge proxy that drops IP etc.) based on only the query, device, country, and timezone. Anything more personalized, we can go to client-side matching and ad insertion. I hope this helps.