<story><title>Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/03/brave_buys_a_search_engine/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>It is necessary, but not sufficient. But you are correct. This is part of why I phrased this in terms of my belief, rather than absolute truth. There&amp;#x27;s no way to convince me you aren&amp;#x27;t tracking if it&amp;#x27;s free. If it is not free, and significantly larger in magnitude than the virtue of tracking, then you at least stand a chance of convincing me.&lt;p&gt;Grocery stores track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, a fairly direct benefit that is difficult to &amp;quot;compete&amp;quot; with as a consumer. Internet companies use it to sell you ads, which is pretty much just about the money, barring exciting conspiracy theories. We can put a decent number on how much money that is, and it really isn&amp;#x27;t that much money. Facebook makes on the order of $20-40 per year in &lt;i&gt;revenue&lt;/i&gt; from a user [1], and the nature of the business is they do better per user than most other people. For something like Cliqz we could easily be &amp;quot;competing&amp;quot; with a revenue of less than $1&amp;#x2F;year&amp;#x2F;user, at which point the business case of that extra dollar vs. the catastrophic loss in business if they get caught is a plausible set of incentives I can believe for them to not do it. Not proof, but plausible.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=19462402&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=19462402&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>dimes</author><text>Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. It will always be more profitable to track users, except in cases like DDG or Brave that stake their reputation on privacy. For instance, I pay for groceries, yet my grocery store tracks my purchases and sells that information. We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. Government regulation is needed.</text></item><item><author>jerf</author><text>&amp;quot;The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option...&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;How my viewpoint has shifted over the years. 10-20 years ago this would have instantly turned me off, but now this is the most exciting line in the entire thing to me. As long as we all expect free, we can&amp;#x27;t expect privacy.&lt;p&gt;@Brave team, who I rather expect will be reading this, I can&amp;#x27;t believe that Cliqz doing tracking on me to improve its results for free will be in my interests if it&amp;#x27;s free. But if I&amp;#x27;m a paying customer, you might be able to convince me that you&amp;#x27;re doing some semi-invasive tracking but not actually selling it to anyone, because it wouldn&amp;#x27;t be worth losing me as a customer.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Been waiting for DDG to do it but last I knew there&amp;#x27;s still no option there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nabusman</author><text>Grocery stores do not just use the data internally but also sell their Point of Sale data to third parties that analyze it and then sell their analysis to anyone willing to pay for it (mostly that is CPG companies). Point is: it isn&amp;#x27;t necessarily a direct benefit to the end customer.</text></comment>
<story><title>Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling</title><url>https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/03/brave_buys_a_search_engine/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jerf</author><text>It is necessary, but not sufficient. But you are correct. This is part of why I phrased this in terms of my belief, rather than absolute truth. There&amp;#x27;s no way to convince me you aren&amp;#x27;t tracking if it&amp;#x27;s free. If it is not free, and significantly larger in magnitude than the virtue of tracking, then you at least stand a chance of convincing me.&lt;p&gt;Grocery stores track you because they can use it to analyze and increase sales, a fairly direct benefit that is difficult to &amp;quot;compete&amp;quot; with as a consumer. Internet companies use it to sell you ads, which is pretty much just about the money, barring exciting conspiracy theories. We can put a decent number on how much money that is, and it really isn&amp;#x27;t that much money. Facebook makes on the order of $20-40 per year in &lt;i&gt;revenue&lt;/i&gt; from a user [1], and the nature of the business is they do better per user than most other people. For something like Cliqz we could easily be &amp;quot;competing&amp;quot; with a revenue of less than $1&amp;#x2F;year&amp;#x2F;user, at which point the business case of that extra dollar vs. the catastrophic loss in business if they get caught is a plausible set of incentives I can believe for them to not do it. Not proof, but plausible.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=19462402&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=19462402&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>dimes</author><text>Simply paying for a service doesn’t remove the economic incentive for the service provider to add tracking. It will always be more profitable to track users, except in cases like DDG or Brave that stake their reputation on privacy. For instance, I pay for groceries, yet my grocery store tracks my purchases and sells that information. We can’t rely on the market to protect our privacy. Government regulation is needed.</text></item><item><author>jerf</author><text>&amp;quot;The service will, eventually, be available as a paid option...&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;How my viewpoint has shifted over the years. 10-20 years ago this would have instantly turned me off, but now this is the most exciting line in the entire thing to me. As long as we all expect free, we can&amp;#x27;t expect privacy.&lt;p&gt;@Brave team, who I rather expect will be reading this, I can&amp;#x27;t believe that Cliqz doing tracking on me to improve its results for free will be in my interests if it&amp;#x27;s free. But if I&amp;#x27;m a paying customer, you might be able to convince me that you&amp;#x27;re doing some semi-invasive tracking but not actually selling it to anyone, because it wouldn&amp;#x27;t be worth losing me as a customer.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m actually excited about the idea of a search engine that I pay for. Been waiting for DDG to do it but last I knew there&amp;#x27;s still no option there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vinger</author><text>But paying for a service connects your real world credit profile to this transaction.  I feel privacy is already broken with the credit card companies selling this information.&lt;p&gt;When someone tracks you and you don&amp;#x27;t pay they will try to link your online activities and identify other activities online to tailor an ad to you.&lt;p&gt;I can confuse and lie to the second group but I can&amp;#x27;t hide from the first group.&lt;p&gt;Anything that requires you to pay by credit card means you are already being tracked.  For privacy I&amp;#x27;m against pay services.</text></comment>