The team behind Brave Browser thinks that Google has an unfair competitive advantage due to its massive trove of user data. In a submission filed with the United Kingdom’s consumer protection agency, Brave argued that the country’s failure to enforce European data protection laws gives Google an unfair advantage.
Brave’s stance
This is a response to the U.K.’s Competition and Market Authority’s concern that enforcing the GDPR would give an additional advantage to Google because of the massive amounts of data it collects through its numerous services.
In an interview with Cointelegraph, Dr. Johnny Ryan, Brave’s chief policy and industry relations officer, insisted that it’s not about the competition between Chrome and Brave, but enforcing the laws that protect consumers:
“RTB Real-time-bidding, an auction for online ads is the biggest data breach in the world, personal data are being broadcasted to thousands of companies.”
Vigorous enforcement of GDPR is fair
However, Dr. Ryan insists that the right approach is “a vigorous and robust enforcement” of the law that goes beyond real-time-bidding. The General Data Protection Regulation prohibits a major tech company from sharing user data across different arms of its business. He further notices that if the authorities don’t do their job,
“We may take them to court!’
BRD’s Adam Traidman on New Products, Crypto Adoption
BC: With over 2 million users in 170 countries, the BRD wallet is well-trusted for its open source, non-custodial and secure design, with many also complimenting the user-friendly interface. Is the key to onboarding in your opinion a combo of privacy and ease of use?
AT: Nearly 3 million users now. The key to successful onboarding starts before that, much further up on the funnel. It’s brand, brand, and brand. That’s been the key to our success. We’ve operated for a long time now with the highest of ethics and transparency. We’ve stuck to our principles when others chased fast money, and this is how we’ve endured the downturn that started in mid-2018.
Our CMO, Spencer Chen, has done a fantastic job in creating a brand that’s both welcoming, embracing, and warm to all consumers in an industry that’s frankly been alienating to new participants.
I’ll give you the Apple example: Their brand engenders trust, you’d buy anything from them … from phones to music. For the consumer business, it all starts with the brand. Our CMO, Spencer Chen, has done a fantastic job in creating a brand that’s both welcoming, embracing, and warm to all consumers in an industry that’s frankly been alienating to new participants. He often jokes that there’s this green-on-black-Matrix-like aesthetic that’s plaguing the crypto industry.
BC: BRD has stated that “Our goal is to bring the number of people unbanked from 1.7 billion to 0”, and emphasized the critical importance of direct wealth ownership and financial sovereignty. How will this vision be made reality?
AT: Usability. Tons more usability for everyday consumers, especially for the unbanked and underbanked. As an example, when there were big issues with the central bank in Venezuela in 2018, we saw a massive uptick in new users from the country. I think we were the #4 ranked app for the entire country. But there was still usability issues, such as the inability to easily send crypto to friends in their address book or trying to understand what seed phrases are and their importance.
There’s just a lot of non-intuitive usability issues for the mainstream audience and the quicker we address them, the faster the broad adoption among the unbanked. This remains the top priority on our consumer roadmap — usability as the killer feature.
