This is a strong departure from the industry standard of data collections. Consequently, aggregation of user's data in the server-side (on Brave premises) is not technically feasible, as we have no means to know who is the original owner of the data. How? By strictly forbidding any user-identifier that could be used to link records as belonging to the same person, considering not only explicit UIDs but also implicit ones. The Web Discovery Project is a methodology and system designed to collect data which cannot be turned into sessions once they reached Brave. But still, the session is there, stored somewhere, and trust that it is not going to be misused is the only protection we have. Will Google Analytics try to de-anonymize the data? I bet not. For instance, Google Analytics data can be used to build sessions that can sometimes be de-anonymized by anyone that has access to them. This linkage leads to sessions, and these sessions are very dangerous with regards to privacy. messages or records, come from the same user. Record linkage is the ability to know that multiple data elements, e.g. The fundamental idea of the Web Discovery Project data collection is simple: to actively prevent Record Linkage. The Web Discovery Project is our proposal for a more responsible and less invasive data collection.
As someone once said, if you do not like reality, feel free to change it. It is not enough for us, and should not be enough for our users either. We are not comfortable with only a promise based on Terms of Service and Privacy Policy agreements. We believe we must do better, if only for selfish reasons because we use our own products, and consequently, our own data is collected. In the trust model, which is the industry standard, the user has very little control and protection comes only from privacy policy and enforcing bodies. Finally, companies can unilaterally decide to change their privacy policies.
Companies can go bankrupt and the data auctioned to the highest bidder. Unethical employees can dig into the data for personal interests.
Governments can issue subpoenas, or get direct access to the data. There are many ways a trust model can fail. We do not want users to have no other choice but to trust us. We want to depart from the current standard model, where users must trust that the company collecting the data will not misuse it, ever, in any circumstance. This data, provided by Brave users, is collected in a very different way than typical data collection. Web Discovery Project is a methodology and system developed by Brave to collect data generated by their users while protecting their privacy and anonymity.īrave needs data to power is privacy search. Web Discovery Project is a methodology and system developed by Brave but heavily inspired by Cliqz's Human Web, we recommend to check the blog post as additional material even though there are, and will be, significant departures as WDP evolves.