From: https://unchainedpodcast.com/brendan-eich-on-how-brave-is-working-to-decentralize/
Laura Shin:
So, how does Brave work?
Brendan Eich:
So, browsers, for a long time, just were sort of the user’s agent in the software sense, that they would do whatever you said, when you clicked on a link or opened a new tab, but I created JavaScript, and even before that, with cookies and images, there were ways to track you. So, what happened over time is the system of surveillance evolved, kind of unplanned, based on these fundamental building blocks, the cookie, the image, and JavaScript, and if you don’t block those by default, you’re not just a user agent as a browser. You’re sort of a blind servant of the advertising tracking system.
So, Brave blocks all that stuff. That’s important. We don’t want the default to be tracked and in danger, under a threat. So, tracking by default is complex, because there’s no formal grammar in the web standards that says, here is the web standard for viewing a web page without being tracked, and here is the technology for being tracked, and you can just block that cleanly. It’s much more subtle. It involves all sorts of variations on themes. It cannot, in fact, be formalized in such a clean way, because there are always ways across a network to track somebody if you’re determined enough to do so, but what we have today is such a permissive system that there’s tons of ways to track, and fortunately for Brave, there are lots of ways to defend.
Other, I would say, browsers are starting to do this. For a long time, the only real protection came from browser extensions. So, Firefox pioneered the extension model for browsers, and then other browsers did their own versions of it, and Chrome’s became predominant because of Chrome’s market power. And so, people can use extensions like uBlock Origin, which we think very highly of, or adblocking extensions, some of which don’t block tracking well at all. There are some, like Ghostery and Disconnect, that are more about tracking protection as well.
