Brave Software, maker of the Brave web browser, is introducing a news reader designed to protect user privacy by preventing groups—both internal and third-party—from tracking the sites, articles, and stories people view.
Brave Today, as the service is called, uses technology that the company says is different from news services offered by Google and Facebook. It is designed to display personalized news feeds in a way that leaves no trace for Brave, ISPs, and third parties to track. The new service is part of Brave’s strategy of differentiating its browser as more storage-friendly than its competitors.
The key to Courage Today is a new content delivery network the company is showing. Typically, news services use a CDN to cache content and then serve it to users. This allows the CDN or service you use to see both the IP address and news feed of each user, and over time, that data can help services build detailed profiles of people’s interests.
Brave Today CDN takes a different approach. It is designed in a way that separates a user’s IP address from the content they request. A single one offers an acceptable load balancing function TLS-encrypted traffic from the user. The load balancer then passes the traffic to the CDN that processes the request.
The load balancer knows the user’s IP address, but because the request is encrypted, it is not visible in the content the user is searching for. The CDN, meanwhile, only sees the request but has no way of knowing the IP address making it. The answers are delivered in reverse order. To prevent data from being combined, Brave says it will use one provider for load balancing and a different one for content delivery.
Here’s how it works:
Ars Technica
To prevent the load balancing provider from using the volume of requests and responses to decrypt the contents of the data, the service will also use a protocol called widthwhich adds characters to the plain before it is saved.
CDN uses several other techniques to preserve the anonymity of users. Among them: extracting different titles that can be used to identify the person who asked.
Brave says it is also taking steps to protect user information from its own employees. Among other things, the company has configured its account with the load balancing provider to restrict access to its logging resources. The load balancing provider also does not provide power for customers to use policy representative to include the requester’s IP address in outgoing requests. In case it changes, however, Brave has also entered into an agreement with the load balancer that restricts access to accounts or use of the process, even if Brave requests it.
The news service will personalize the content using data that never leaves the browser. Initially, this will work by finding matches between domains in a collection of RSS feeds based on the most popular sites such as ranking by Alexa, Feedly, and Comscore. Finally, the service will use Brave’s user advertising system, which also works using only locally stored data.
Brave Today has 15 news categories from 300 sources. The news reader will integrate directly with all browsers except for Android. To access the reader, update Brave for mobile computers to version 1.18.70 or later or Brave for iOS to 1.22 or later. Then open a new tab and scroll down. Brave browser has more than 22 million active monthly users.