Brave Officially Goes To War Against Google, Probe Has Been Triggered By a Formal Complaint From Brave

Recently, it was reported that a top executive from Brave would speak in front of the United States Senate, which highlighted the magnitude of what the Brave team was working on. However, in a very interesting development, the hearing revealed a startling bit of information: Google may have violated the GDPR policy that was instituted one year ago.

Dr. Johnny Ryan, the Brave executive who spoke in front of the Senate, registered a formal complaint, which subsequently triggered a probe by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC). The probe, according to a blog post by Brave, is “a major GDPR probe into ‘suspected infringement’ by Google’s ‘DoubleClick/Authorized Buyers’ advertising business.”

Ireland’s DPC, Google’s lead authority under the GDPR, in its official statement says,

The purpose of the inquiry is to establish whether processing of personal data carried out at each stage of an advertising transaction is in compliance with the relevant provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR principles of transparency and data minimisation, as well as Google’s retention practices, will also be examined.

Web experts have also recommended Brave over Google Chrome, which remains the most popular browser by a large margin. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, has made the switch himself, publishing a blog post that explained why the Brave Browser was a much better alternative.

Users too seem to be taking that route, with the Brave browser seeing tremendous growth – surpassing Firefox and Opera, growing twice as fast as Google Chrome and reaching 1 million monthly downloads.