Welcome to this week’s BAT Community Update! Thank you to Dan Murphy for his contributions!

BLOG: Google faces first investigation by its European lead authority for “suspected infringement of the GDPR, following formal complaint from Brave

Today, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has announced a major GDPR probe into “suspected infringement” by Google’s “DoubleClick/Authorized Buyers” advertising business. The probe was triggered by a formal complaint from Dr Johnny Ryan, Chief Policy Officer at Brave, the private web browser.



The Irish Data Protection Commission has just announced that “a statutory inquiry pursuant to section 110 of the Data Protection Act 2018 has been commenced in respect of Google Ireland Limited’s processing of personal data in the context of its online Ad Exchange”



Read the full post here: https://brave.com/dpc-google/

BLOG: Dr. Johnny Ryan’s testimony at the US Senate Judiciary Committee

Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave testified on Tuesday, 21 May at the US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Understanding the Digital Advertising Ecosystem and the Impact of Data Privacy and Competition Policy”. The other panelists are Brian O’Kelley, founder of AppNexus; Avi Goldfarb, University of Toronto; Fiona M. Scott Morton, Yale School of Management; and Jan M. Rybnicek, Freshfields.



Read the full post here: https://brave.com/ryan-testimony-may-2019/



Watch the video here: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/understanding-the-digital-advertising-ecosystem-and-the-impact-of-data-privacy-and-competition-policy

AMA: Highlights from our very first partner AMA with Lin Dai, CEO & CO-Founder of TAP Network

Brave’s most recent AMA took place on May 20th and featured Lin Dai, CEO & Co-Founder of Hooch App and TAP Network, the first advertising and data network that connects brands to reward consumers directly using blockchain. Brave’s partnership with TAP, announced back in February of 2019, will allow Brave users to redeem Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) for real-world rewards offered by over 250,000 top brand partners in the TAP Network.



Read the full text here: https://brave.com/ama-with-lin-dai/

BRAVE R&D: Requirement Analysis of Decentralized Virtual Private Networks (dVPNs)

In this blogpost we explore the ecosystem of decentralized Virtual Private Networks (dVPNs), a new form of VPNs with no central authority. DVPNs are fairly recent VPN solutions where the users are both client and server, in the sense that when they join a dVPN they also offer a portion of their upload bandwidth to carry traffic for other users. We first overview existing user-hosted dVPNs, both commercial and research solutions, and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Next, we derive a set of requirements for deploying a trusted and reliable dVPN. We finally benchmark each existing dVPN against such requirements based on available public information. It is interesting to notice that these requirements should be a good starting point for classic/centralized VPNs, and this is not always the case today.



Read the full post here: https://brave.com/analysis-of-dvpns/

BRAVE REWARDS: Twitter tips now available for testing in Brave Nightly (desktop). Reward users directly for great tweets!

For users of our Nightly desktop version, we’re testing a new feature for tipping tweets with Brave Rewards. Tips are sent instantly for those verified via creators.brave.com. Tips to unverified users are held in your browser. Your feedback is welcome at https://community.brave.com/



Check out the new Tips landing page: https://brave.com/tips



Note: There will be no user grants for Brave users testing the Nightly build. Users who wish to test Twitter tipping in the first 30 days must self-fund their Brave Rewards wallet.



EVENT: Ben Livshits, Brave’s Chief Scientist, to speak about Brave at Crypto Valley Conference 2019 in Zug, Switzerland (Jun. 24-26)

Professionals and experts from all around the world will gather together in order to discuss important topics such as blockchain and use of it in the industry.



Learn more + buy tickets here: https://blockference.com/blockchain-conferences/crypto-valley-conference-2019-zug-644

BAT Community Merch Giveaway Winners!

The winners for our BAT Community Daily Merch Giveaways for this week are:

Monday (Reddit): Mooks79

Tuesday (Twitter): @TimTannian

Wednesday (Facebook): Jocelyn Cabillan

Thursday (Contributor Special): terabyter9000

Click here to see pics of previous giveaway winners rocking their BAT/Brave merch!: https://imgur.com/a/lhF1G9I



Be sure to tune in to our social media channels every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and Friday to participate in our daily merch giveaways for your chance to win!

Featured Creators

Punjabi Cooking on YouTube

“Hello Friends,

My name is Manjeet Kaur. I am the host of this channel Punjabi Cooking here I share all recipes direct from my Kitchen. Punjabi Cooking is about tasty delicious and Yummy food recipes that can be made easily at home. My cooking videos are simple and show how to cook with the ingredients commonly available in every Kitchen.”



Channel link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMdK9x0i5JDfOyAYc7KePKA/featured

Everything Science on YouTube

Welcome to my channel! What you will find here are science videos. Mainly physics, technology, chemistry, and biology (and specific branches of these topics).



Channel link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeLdtIbVMCVl7sIeuHchwMA/featured

LearningFrenchFree.com

Bonjour! Are you ready to spend a few minutes or hours to learn or review some French? Good! you’ll find on this website 350+ audio files to listen to and repeat, all given to you here for FREE!

Client Updates

Android v1.0.94-rc.3

https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs/releases/tag/v1.0.94-rc.3

Dev Channel v.0.66.75

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v0.66.75

Beta Channel v0.65.110

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v0.65.110

iOS v1.9.3

Release notes:

This one is just a small housekeeping update with a couple internal optimizations. It also includes a fix for an issue that caused Brave to crash for a small number of people.

Release Channel v.0.64.77

Release notes:

Upgraded Chromium to 74.0.3729.169. (#4526)

Brave Team Tweets

There's no shortage of the amount of love I have for this, and it's something we're looking into for paid content and service offerings. — Luke Mulks (@lukemulks) May 21, 2019 What if we could partially pay for our subscriptions services with BAT?

That's right, our sync encrypts with a user-private key, encrypted blobs go on cloud storage. We can't see the data. Working on OPAQUE based key recovery idea for users who expect to be able to get data even if all devices lost. — BrendanEich (@BrendanEich) May 22, 2019 Can Brave see what’s syncing?

There are 2 models in the Brave Ads ecosystem: the user model, and the publisher model. In the publisher model (coming soon), ads are placed in cooperating pages. In the user model, ads surface as notifications. When clicked, they open in a private tab and you get 70% of revenue. — Sampson (@BraveSampson) May 22, 2019 Publisher model… coming soon?

Ads should be available in Italy by the end of the year. — Luke Mulks (@lukemulks) May 22, 2019 Brave ads coming to Italy!

News You Should Know

Percival: Making In-Browser Perceptual Ad Blocking Practical With Deep Learning

Check out this new paper published by Zain ul Abi Din, Panagiotis Tigas, Samuel T. King, and Benjamin Livshits. In this paper, they present PERCIVAL, a browser-embedded, lightweight, deep learning-powered ad blocker. PERCIVALembeds itself within the browser’s image rendering pipeline, which makes it possible to intercept every image obtained during page execution and to perform blocking based on applying machine learning for image classification to flag potential ads.



Read more here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.07444

Advertising Fraud Losses to Reach $42 Billion in 2019, Driven by Evolving Tactics by Fraudsters

A new study from Juniper Research forecasts that advertisers will lose $42 billion of ad spend globally this year to fraudulent activities committed via online, mobile and in-app advertising. This is a 21% increase from the $35 billion lost to advertising fraud in 2018. This growth will be driven by increasingly sophisticated techniques being implemented by fraudsters.



Read more here: https://www.juniperresearch.com/press/press-releases/advertising-fraud-losses-to-reach-$42-billion

GDPR adtech complaints keep stacking up in Europe

The latest clutch of GDPR complaints aimed at the real-time bidding (RTB) system have been filed in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain.



All the complaints argue that RTB entails “wide-scale and systemic” breaches of Europe’s data protection regime, as personal date harvested to profile Internet users for ad-targeting purposes is broadcast widely to bidders in the adtech chain. The complaints have implications for key adtech players, Google and the Internet Advertising Bureau, which set RTB standards used by other in the online adverting pipeline.

GDPR adtech complaints keep stacking up in Europe Click the post to read the full text

Roaring Fans

Ok, so @brave browser is really impressive. As an internet user, it's blocks tracking. I've tested it. Strips out GA and everything. As a website owner it's a bit worrying but deep down I know it's the right way for browsers to work. Also there is revenue options. Review soon. — Marty Meany (@martinmeany) May 23, 2019

Just enabled @brave rewards! My browser pays me for viewing ads. Yours too? https://t.co/Oq5VVfrBaT pic.twitter.com/pnElW7yGax — Christoph Burgdorf (@cburgdorf) May 21, 2019

Brave is the only piece of software I’ve actually tried to inform my friends about… thank u for making that a thing. and for js too 😊 #grateful — Thomas Greco (@tgrecojs) May 23, 2019

After #downloading @brave 's internet browser on my phone it's faster than my laptop. . . My laptops trash btw , but I'm still impressed none the less. Thanks for the #kickass #browser — Crabberticus (@crabberticus) May 23, 2019

From Reddit: