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Your first comment is a bit misleading; Brave blocks third-party ads and trackers by default. You don't have to give BAT to anybody for this functionality—it's our baseline.

We block third-party ads and trackers because they have been leverage to spread malware, inject crypto-mining scripts into pages, push malicious extension onto unsuspecting users, and more. Not to mention, the entire model of unannounced tracking is in stark contrast to GDPR and relevant legislation.

The user ought to be sovereign over their machine, their experience, and their data. That is what Brave believes.

We understand that blocking ads and trackers will result in some impact to many websites. It is for this reason we created the User Growth Pool during our token sale, setting aside 300M Basic Attention Tokens.

For several months we have been channeling the UGP funds into the wallets of content creators. We do this via regular, monthly grants to users (which wind up going to their top sites), referral links which pay $5 in BAT for every user you bring to the Brave platform, contests (such as our 100K BAT giveaway), and more.

We understand that has helpful as the UGP is, it won't be there forever. As such, the web needs to be sustained by some other means. This is why we're developing Brave Ads.

Brave Ads is a completely-opt-in digital advertising model which doesn't leak private data, doesn't reward fraudsters and scammers, and doesn't put Brave in any position to abuse your trust as a user.

With Brave Ads, consenting users will benefit from local (on your device) machine-learning, which uses it's knowledge of the user to select the best ads to display. The ML operates off of local data, meaning nothing is sent out to third parties, and Brave isn't collecting personal information about you.

If the user consents to seeing ads, they will also collect up to 70% of the ad revenue. Users will finally get paid for their attention; they've had their attention stolen from them for far too long.

As I stated earlier though, all of this is optional. If you choose not to participate in Brave Ads, you still get a solid ad-and-tracker blocker in Brave. And you still get the option to directly support your favorite content creators out of your own pocket.



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