Free Lunch

The common idiom ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ is as true today as it was when coined in the mid-1800’s to describe the practice of taverns inflating drink prices in order to offer ‘free’ food. In 2020 you are unlikely to find any restaurants offering a free steak dinner on the condition that you buy a £40 Diet Coke but the underlying warning and wisdom can be applied to a significant portion of our modern, digital lives.

As the Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook grew and became a major part of our lives we collectively gorged ourselves on the products and services which they offered us for ‘free’. And for good reason – services such as Google Maps and WhatsApp are excellent!

While there are no upfront fees to pay, the real cost of these services is that much of our personal data is collected and sold to the highest bidder for the purpose of direct and often creepy advertising. While some Big Tech collection methods danced a merry jig on the lines between legal and illegal, moral and immoral, in general the deal is clear; your data for our services.

Despite sensational headlines to the contrary, the general public seem to understand the deal they are being offered and are broadly comfortable for it to continue. The lack of any meaningful move away from the bad actors (I’m looking at you Facebook) shows that if given the choice between paying up front for a service or getting it for free, then most people will chose to give up their data and get it for free. Given the available options, we’re very happy to be the product.

This poses a problem for advocates of personal privacy – simply put, our ideas and arguments are not strong enough to outweigh the benefits most people get from giving away their personal data. There are lots of great reasons why protecting your data is a good idea but there’s no point in wasting digital ink discussing them if the only practicable alternative to collecting and selling user data is charging users an up-front fee.

The $331 billion dollar question, which is the amount spend on digital advertising last year, is whether an alternative way to structure our online economy exists which continues to allow open access to digital platforms but also protects users from data harvesting? Can we stop being the product and become people again?

To answer these questions, we need to start by being a little bit Brave.

Making Ends Meet

As it happens, stopping technology companies from tracking your online movement is a reasonably straight forward thing to do. Simply build features into web browsers which actively suppress all advertisements from being displayed and aggressively blocks tracking technologies. ‘Ad Blockers’ do a similar job. Companies can still track you when you’re directly using their platforms but this sledgehammer approach does successfully stop most data collection.

So, we’ve blocked all advertisements and tracking. Job done. Humanity saved. Time to roll out the 'Mission Accomplished ' banner.

Not so fast.

The problem with this approach is that advertising is a perfectly valid business model and allows companies to offer their services without requiring customers to pay a subscription charge; services can also be made available to a much wider audience which in turn boosts digital inclusion. Blocking all advertisements is an existential threat to the web because the entire digital economy is built on a bedrock of advertising money, removing a large portion of this income would result in a digital wasteland of abandoned websites and services.

Last year the first serious attempt to deliver an alternative solution was introduced to the world when Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and Firefox, launched his new project, a brand new web browser called ‘Brave’.

(Fig1. Brave Logo)

The Brave browser’s offering is simple, by default the browser blocks advertisements and tracking cookies but users can opt-in to being shown ‘Brave Advertisements’. The big difference, and Brave’s unique selling point, is that users receive 70% of the revenue for all of the advertisements they see and Brave keeps 30%. Users are rewarded regardless of whether you click on the ad, or ignore it. Users can limit the number of ads they see from 1 to 5 per hour. Suddenly, you’re no longer the product, you’ve become a willing partner in a three-way exchange between yourself, the advertiser and the publisher (Brave).

Displaying random advertisements to people isn’t very effective so Brave allows advertisers to directly target users without needing to hoover up their personal information into a giant central database. The way Brave does this is by analysing the websites you visit and storing a summary of the types of sites you visit locally on your PC, laptop or mobile phone – your personal data never leaves your device. Every few days the browser downloads a list of advertisements and if the categories set by the advertiser match the types of sites you visit then it’s displayed (for anyone who knows me, you won’t be surprised that I get a lot of Bitcoin/Crypto advertisements 🙂).

I’ll briefly mention that this approach shifts the economic incentives of websites. Users can keep the funds for themselves, set up regular donations to their favourite content creators or use it to access premium web services such as access to newspaper subscriptions. How web services should respond to this change is an important topic and something worth investigating but in the interest of brevity we’ll set this aspect aside.

The outcome of this innovative approach is that individuals keep their personal data, advertisers can continue to offer targeted advertisements and web services can be funded directly by users’ advertisement funds. From personal experience, using Brave feels like a much healthier way to build a robust, inclusive and happy digital ecosystem. One where websites and services are encouraged to focus on user experience and retention rather than working out what the maximum number of advertisements they can fit on the screen at any given time.

(Fig2/3.Donation Confirmation and Verified Website)

Brave is still relatively new but they have already begun displaying advertisements for large companies like Amazon and Pizza Hut. Likewise, major websites such as The Guardian and Wikipedia have signed up and allow users to donate their earnings. I’m incredibly excited to see how the Brave ecosystem grows and evolves over the coming months and years and I would highly recommend you give it a go 😄.

You can get the browser for Windows, macOS, iOS and Android here: Download Brave (This is a referral link)

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