Comment by miki123211
1 year ago
I disagree, as being able to earn BAT incentivizes fraud, and fraud protection cannot be done well without a significant loss of privacy.
There's no way to confirm that you've watched an ad, you can write a Python script that pretends to be the Brave browser and sends the right requests to their API, and there's no way to distinguish those two on their side. The easiest (if not the only) way to make this difficult is to require lots of tracking and fingerprinting, which is hard to emulate well with a custom script. This is one major reason why tracking is so crucial for the ad economy to work.
I don't get your point.
There is no way to confirm whether you've watched an ad with existing systems either. Ad impression / click / PPC fraud is rampant, and adtech is in a perpetual battle to detect and prevent it.
A solution like BAT isn't meant to address fraud. It's meant to address user privacy and monetization of web services by serving ads that don't track the user, and by allowing the user to directly support the services they use.
The fact advertisers have inserted themselves as middlemen between consumers and producers for decades now has corrupted all forms of media, not just the internet. The solution by Brave is not perfect, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. Without such solutions user privacy and experience on the internet will inevitably continue to degrade, as publishers optimize creating content specifically designed to please advertisers, and adtech optimizes systems designed to extract as much data from users as possible.
Advertising is an absolute scourge on humanity. As we move towards a transhumanist future, I shudder to imagine the machiavellian ideas adtech has in store for us. They've already experimented with face and eye tracking, and I'm sure they're thinking of ways of injecting ads directly into our brain... We should be open to any alternative solution that steers us away from this future, even if it's not perfect.