Josep M. Pujol: evaluation

Transcript context

…Actually, that project the use of browsing data, if you want, that starts from Brave, it starts from the previous company. That's how we actually like gather enough data to start developing the search engine. But it's a very controversial topic, right, because there is like certain tendency to have this dichotomy, either data or privacy. This dichotomy is actually false. Right? It's simple as that. I wrote extensively about it. People can check it out. But, basically, the the whole point is not so much that data is a problem, it's like how you collect that data. Right? I'm not talking about opt in or pellets or like a legal issue, right? Those aside. It's more like what kind of purpose the data will have and how the data is collected, which makes it dangerous or not. For instance, like Brave, if you people who want to contribute, they can opt in to something that's called web discovery project. Right? And in there, they will send us browsing data. Right? That sounds dangerous. The data would be made. Right? It's not that we collect your browsing history or your search history. No. Right? That would be dangerous. That would be, like, privacy problem. What you will contribute is, like, individual data elements that are anonymous. Right? So someone has visited this site and has engaged so much on with it. Right? Then what any of those data elements that people send us, we have absolutely no way to know whether they come from the same person or not. So we do not learn anything about you or about me. Right? What we learn is that someone is anonymous. There's a lot of technical details here. It's not that just we do not use user IDs, neither implicit or explicit. It's just, like, the data is, like, basically sent using a mixing network to remove, like, network fingerprinting. The messages are homogenized so that they actually have to pass a quorum. So more than x people need to send the same amount of data, but the same data in order to be actually received by us. That's like a to that approval to have so there's, like, a lot of, like, technical merit. But at the end of the day, what is important is that the data that we receive is anonymous. It's not anonymized. Right? Or is sildonimus. No. It's those are dangerous. Right? Those are the things that they can later be be anonymized. The data that we've got is just anonymous and and it serves a single purpose. Right? In this case, to know that this particular page is popular or not. Right? Or that this particular page was clicked after a particular query to build query logs. So that's the kind of data that we collect. And without that, it would be actually very difficult to build a search engine. Google and Microsoft do the same thing, whether they admit it or not. Actually, there is like a nice release of some documents that happened yesterday or like a couple of days ago, where there is like some private APIs at Google. That's natural. This data is collected. And again, the problem is not the data. of some documents that happened yesterday or like a couple of days ago, where there is like some private APIs at Google. That's natural. This data is collected. And again, the problem is not the data. The same way that the problem is not the advertisement. Right? The problem is like if by doing advertisement, you actually put your privacy at risk because it's tracking extensions. Right? Knowing your browsing history or your search history is extremely problematic, and that's something that we do not want to know and we do not collect. 1 of the attack vectors that that we consider is that if we actually had to release our data either to a hacker or to a government agency of some sort. We could release it knowingly that no particular person could be identified or profiled. Yeah. That's really interesting. So if you're in a country where, you have reason to be concerned about this sort of stuff, then this becomes a an extremely valuable option.…

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