Brave fights Google amid growing demand for privacy

Privacy browser Brave has created a rival from Google

GOOG
flagship search engine with its latest acquisition. But the timing could have been better.

Announced yesterday, Brave has acquired the search engine Tailcat, which will serve as the basis of Brave Search, an alternative to Google searches that do not follow users’ search habits. Unlike most search engines, Tailcat’s product is based on an independent search index and does not collect IP addresses or use personally identifiable information to target search results. “Brave will also explore blockchain-based options and new developments, including for e-commerce,” the announcement reads.

Unfortunately, the news came the same day when Google announced that it would stop building and using tracking tools used to deliver targeted ads, starting next year. While this can be a big win for privacy advocates, smaller businesses that do not have their own first-party database resources could be disadvantaged.

“Google is trying to follow the Internet on a course that continues to benefit its infrastructure and benefits,” Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave, said in an email to Forbes. “Before other things can take a more radical, user-oriented approach.” Eich is known as the creator of the JavaScript programming language and co-founder of Firefox’s parent company, Mozilla.

According to Eich, the search giant is catching up with the technological and operational developments. “Brave, DuckDuckGo, Apple

AAPL
, and many others, have business models that are not dependent on the kinds of opaque, real-time systems that Google has been successful at, ”he writes. “Anyone with a real privacy web site should be concerned if Google tells people ‘privacy is the absence of detection by another web site. ”

Click here to subscribe to the Forbes CryptoAsset & Blockchain Advisor

San Francisco-based Brave was founded in 2015 with the goal of providing web users with faster and safer browsing aimed at privacy protection. In 2017, the company raised $ 35 million in about 30 seconds through an initial coin offering, bringing the total to $ 42 million.

Brave’s web browser, which currently has more than 25 million active users monthly and more than 1 million verified publishers, blocks gripping ads and trackers and offers rewards in the form of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) based on users’ attention to the sites spend their visit, which can be exchanged for a currency of their choice. Brave says their advertisers see an average 9% throughput for their campaigns, compared to the industry average of 2%.

The demand for data privacy is increasing. In January, private messaging platform Signal saw a 62-fold increase in users following a controversial update of WhatsApp’s privacy policy, according to a Reuters report. At the same time, another encrypted messaging app Telegram surpassed 500 million active users worldwide.

‘In the beginning, main users are the most important, but as the benefits of privacy become clear, the demand for privacy extends to larger and larger circles of users. We hear users say that they would never return to the intrusive tools they used before, once they switched to privacy-for-design solutions, ”says Eich. “It’s like quitting smoking.”

Brave Search is the latest addition to the company’s privacy retention range of products, including a newsreader, Brave Today, a Firewall + VPN service and an advertising platform, Brave Ads, which has delivered nearly 3,000 private advertising campaigns in 200 countries with large advertisers like Verizon

VZ
, PayPal and Amazon

AMZN
. Private video conferencing service is also underway.