Good News Brave BAT Holders Google In Trouble

Published in

The Cryptoverse

4 min readSep 14, 2018

On Today’s Episode of The Cryptoverse…

I’ve got some good news for any of your holders of the Basic Attention Token, which I think you’ll appreciate. Many of you may already be familiar with the Brave Browser, in fact some of you may be using it right now to block YouTube ads on The Cryptoverse.

The basic idea behind the Brave Browser is to make ads opt-in rather than opt-out. Ad blocking is technically opting out because ads appear by default.

Episode Transcript & Notes

Ultimately Brave will pay you in Basic Attention Token (BAT) if you opt to turn Brave Ads on. It’s a brilliant model and works for creators, viewers and advertisers.

Now whether you’re aware of the Brave project or not, you probably have noticed that there is somewhat of a privacy movement going on.

A story has come out recently showing how the Brave project is taking full advantage of this movement to further its cause. I mean, if you are sailing to a destination, it helps if you are sailing in the same direction that the wind is blowing, right?

So now that the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now in full force, the Brave project are petitioning to trigger an EU-wide investigation into the practices of Google and other digital advertising companies.

The argument is that companies had 2 years to prepare for GDPR and now that it’s in force, these tech giants are still falling foul of it.

This is an important case to see whether the new European privacy law has any teeth or whether tech giants like Google are so powerful they can just ignore it.

And also let’s not assume they are guilty. We covered this in the last video, just because there is an accusation of wrongdoing does not mean they are guilty.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-privacy-complaint/mozilla-co-founders-brave-files-adtech-complaint-against-google-idUSKCN1LS2JL

So Johnny Ryan, Brave’s Chief Policy Officer said:

“There is a massive and systematic data breach at the heart of the behavioral advertising industry. Despite the two-year lead-in period before the GDPR, adtech companies have failed to comply”

They are saying that even now when as person hits a website where Google handles the advertising, intimate personal data that describes the person is broadcast to dozens of companies for the purposes of advertising.

If you remember back when I interviewed Brendan Eich right when the Brave project was launched, he explained how ‘Browser Fingerprinting’ as he called it means that websites even use information like the resolution of your screen in order to uniquely identify you in combination with other data.

Basically if Google gets pinched for this they can be fined up to 4% of their global turnover.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266206/googles-annual-global-revenue/

In 2017, Google’s revenue amounted to 109.65 billion US dollars, which could mean a fine of up to $4.4b. But that’s not where the real damage will be done.

The real damage will be if this sets a legal precedent and scares the hell out of smaller adtech companies.

To me this is a masterstroke from the Brave project on 2 fronts.

Even if Google gets cleared, this is some of the best possible PR for the Brave project since they are positioning themselves as the white knight fighting against the evil dragon in defense of the people
If Brave wins, it means thousands of ad companies are going to need a new, compliant tech solution, and what do you know Brave happen to have a privacy centric business and advertising model.

I do love Brendan Eich, that guy comes across so gentle but such a genius.

Basic Attention Token is ranked number 45 by market cap:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/basic-attention-token/

And is currently trading at 15 cents.

It’s biggest exchange is Binance, where BAT trades against Bitcoin, Ethereum and Binance Coin.

https://uk.tradingview.com/chart/9Ly0ynVv/

If we take a 1 year view of the chart we can see that BAT has fluctuated but has remained within a range of 2,000 to 6,000 satoshis, hitting it’s annual low just a couple of days ago on the 12th of September.

So my fellow BAT holders, keep an eye on this story because if it goes our way, demand for the Basic Attention Token may increase sharply as a result.

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