I don't know exactly why the recent uptick, but lately I've had a bunch of people ask me if I've tried the Brave web browser. Why they'd ask me that is much more obvious: Brave is a privacy-focused browser that nukes ads and trackers. It also has some cool built-in stuff like the ability to create a new private browsing window in Tor rather than just your classic incognito window that might ditch all your cookies and browsing history but still connect to the internet directly from your own IP address. But the thing that's really caught the attention of the people I've been speaking to is Brave Rewards which is an innovative way of simultaneously eschewing traditional ads whilst still shuffling money towards content creators. It works on the basis of awarding "Basic Attention Tokens" (BAT) based on where people spend their time browsing or choose to donate. I'm a bit passionate about that topic after declaring traditional ad networks to be evil and deciding to ditch them altogether in favour of the sponsorship you see at the top of this blog.
Anyway, yes, I had tried Brave before but no, hadn't really used it to any great extent. And then I got this email on the weekend:
I am not affiliated with Brave, but it is my new goto browser. I wanted to recommend that you set-up your site (HIBP) to allow BAT donations. I think that your community of users would love to have this as an option.
It was 6 years ago now that I first introduced donations to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) and remain enormously happy with that approach (although admittedly some of those items are a bit out of date). I'm continually amazed at people's willingness to give back via that page so adding the ability to take BAT donations via Brave seemed like a really good idea. As such, if you fire up HIBP in Brave you'll now see the ability to chip in directly from the browser:
And if you're really keen, you can chip in some BAT on a monthly basis:
And as the bloke who originally reached out quite rightly says:
The nice thing about these BAT donations is that they are anonymous and as simple as a click, the best solution I have seen to date.
Which is just great. I'm going to spend a lot more time in Brave because I really love the philosophy of it (that incognito mode over Tor is just great), I hope this post drives others to take a look whether it be just for privacy or to help support HIBP. Brave only takes a few minutes to setup, go and grab it from brave.com