July 27, Brave Software partners with Guardian to bring greater levels of security and privacy to the iPhone and iPad users.
This partnership will combine the privacy stack of the two companies — Brave’s privacy focused browser with Guardian’s VPN and firewall service. The iOS users of Brave Browser will be able with one click to turn on Brave Firewall + VPN that will protect the entire device from privacy intruding trackers.
A screenshot of Brave’s VPN+Firewall. Source: Brave.
Guardian is good for Brave users
Brave CEO Brendan Eich told Cointelegraph that he has been a long-time user of Guardian VPN, and now Brave is making it easier for its users to discover this service:
“I’ve paid for their firewall already and I use it. But many users haven’t discovered it, with Brave we’re promoting it, making it easier, the switch is right there in the settings. So I think this is good for Guardian It’s good for Brave users who haven’t acquired a VPN.”
Brave users will not be able to subscribe to Guardian’s VPN with Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), however. Apple does not currently allow it.
Anti-encryption bills won’t affect Brave
Discussing anti-encryption bills, Eich opined that even if such a bill were passed, it is unlikely that authorities would go after Brave. He believes that law enforcement would have more valuable targets to pursue:
“Now, if this turns into ‘you must backdoor your browser, your open source browser’, I would be very surprised because it won’t really work. And of course, I think that the higher value targets for it through three letter agencies are the operating systems that the code is always running. We’re just an alternative browser. I don’t think we’re going to get any new subpoenas or national security letters yet. If we did, I couldn’t tell you because I’d be dead.”
Brave is not a “niche” product
Eich does not see Brave as a “niche” product. He feels it is on the same growth trajectory as Firefox, with the pro-privacy momentum helping to overthrow Google’s market dominance:
“What we don’t view ourselves as ‘niche’, every browser goes through it from zero to one, to in our case, heading toward 16 million users monthly. So, that’s not niche,that’s getting through the same growth curve that Firefox did back in the day. [There is] a rising sort of wave of consciousness that comes from this lead user cohort from and reporters who break these stories, antitrust regulators and others who are taking Google to court.”
Brave recently itself came under fire from privacy activists who forked an “anti-adware” iteration of the browser.
