By Jim Harper

Does regulation get consumers what they want? The premise got an airing last week when a TV news reporter tweeted out a promo for her story noting that dog grooming is an uncontrolled Wild West. “There are currently *no* regulations in place in *any* state,” she wrote. “Concerned after hearing that?”

I’m not. But some people do seem to think of regulation as a
direct line to consumer protection. It’s a conservative instinct (in the
non-ideological sense): If things are under control, they are better. Even in
the world of dog beautification. Never mind the benefits of dynamism,
competition, and innovation.

The internet privacy debate shares some of these dynamics. Legislation, both passed and proposed, seems aimed at bringing things under control rather than enhancing consumer welfare. If making consumers better off were the goal, I think you’d see different behavior from traditional privacy advocates, and I have a suggestion.

Saying that a set of advocates wants control more than
consumer benefits has at least two problems. One is that I can’t see into the
minds of privacy advocates to read their true motivations, nor can I observe
how they believe their actions will advance their goals. A second problem is
that even the traditional, pro-regulatory privacy advocacy community does not
share a single, unified goal or plan. It is a bit much to claim to know what “they”
are about when there are so many.

But one can inductively learn what they are not about
by searching the websites of privacy advocacy organizations for the word “Brave.”
Such a search produces oodles of references to “Brave New World.” Testimonies
and letters that cite our brave men and women in uniform. Caitlyn Jenner is
brave. And down at the bottom of most such searches, using Google, I get an
interesting, unpunctuated search suggestion: “what browser am I using”.

The Brave browser is a competitor in the world of applications that give us access to the World Wide Web. It touts itself as “Three times faster than Chrome. Better privacy by default than Firefox. Uses 35% less battery on mobile.” As a privacy tool, it’s a dagger — maybe yet a small one — aimed at the heart of “adtech,” shorthand for Google, Facebook, and a number of companies operating in the background.

Out of the box, Brave blocks most ads and the trackers that come with them. It throws away cookies from sites other than the ones you visit. It makes your browser harder to recognize without cookies. It upgrades you to secure connections when available. And it blocks malicious code and sites. (It also writes blog posts; the preceding text of this paragraph is all lifted from this page.)

Brave also has a competing advertising ecosystem that aims to improve on the status quo in numerous ways. Brave presents users with advertisements in a relatively private and unobtrusive way, separate from the web-surfing experience and subject to user controls. Users of the Brave Rewards system receive a cryptocurrency called BAT, the Basic Attention Token, which they can pay out in tips to content creators. The browser also allocates BAT to sites that have drawn users’ attention.

That trick, allocating payments to sites that draw
attention, mimics early PayPal, which people were all too happy to sign up for
given the promise of money. With wide adoption among content creators and web
surfers, Brave could really start to dent the current ad market, which is not
owed its current structure or profitability by anyone. That would undercut the
personal data collection that drives so many privacy advocates to distraction.

Is there something about traditional privacy advocacy that
is resistant to promoting the Brave browser? The question is actually beside
the point and slightly rude. Getting consumers what they want is the point. And
for that I am happy to recommend Brave, which I now use on my Android phone,
having installed it in under a minute: a seamless transition from my prior
browser.

I don’t know everything about it, and it could have costs and consequences that I can’t discern. But my motivations I know. I am sympathetic to concerns with “commodification” — the intrusion of commerce into dimensions of life that were once naturally separate from it. I am certainly less concerned with adtech than the orthodox privacy advocate. My interest is in becoming a BAT-kajillionaire while the rest of you muck around with your sad, retrograde dollars, Euros, pounds, yen, and yuan. I will not make my fortune in dog grooming, alas, as the coming licensure, inspection, and continuing education requirements are too onerous.

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