> Simply observe the event in which a user does a query q in Brave and then, within one hour, does the same query on a different search engine. What we do is to move the script that detects bad-queries to the browser, run it against the queries that the user does in real-time and then, when all conditions are met, send the following data back to our servers.
Wait. Brave browser sends back to Brave Search engine about your browsing? Other search engines usage, but also crawl pages on your computer to help build their search index?
"Brave doesn’t follow the sneaky practices of other big tech search engines. The Web Discovery Project is opt-in, and the data collected under the Web Discovery Project has specific protections to ensure anonymity." per https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409406835469-Wh...
I think mentioning your affiliation with Brave might go a long way in contextualizing why you are defending/rationalizing this (even if opt-in).
Editing to add that I don't mean to imply ill will on your part, but that I think being affiliated with Brave might have you taking this type of practice a little more lightly than it probably should be taken.
If you don’t trust Brave then, yeah, they could be doing anything in the browser or on their servers - but that snippet you quoted is a slightly out of context statement from a big document about how they collect data like this, but _don’t_ collect or store it in a way that they could associate it with a user.
If you don’t trust that they’re doing what they say they are, then the document doesn’t mean anything. Although that would also mean the quote is kind of meaningless…
The rest of the document is worst. They say they are using your computer to crawl pages you visit and report back to their server. Even Google doesn't do that.
This specific feature is already opt-in, but historically the answer has always been "yes" for dozens of 'features' like this that fly under the radar until users start complaining, and then eventually get converted to opt-in or removed in order to save face.
And Google gets the same data joining your cookies ever since Google Plus unified auth across their properties a decade ago. Wait you mean you thought G+ was supposed to compete against Facebook-the-product and not just Facebook-the-ad-network? Oops
Wait. Brave browser sends back to Brave Search engine about your browsing? Other search engines usage, but also crawl pages on your computer to help build their search index?
Ref: https://github.com/brave/web-discovery-project/blob/main/mod...