Brave Adds an Integrated News Reader

Brave announced today that it is integrating a privacy-preserving news reader called Brave Today into its flagship web browser.

“The Brave Today news reader is accessible via tabs and is delivered anonymously to the user’s browser via Brave’s new private content delivery network (CDN),” the firm says. “When users scroll down to fetch the feed on a new tab page, they will discover links to content published by major media outlets in 15 different categories, including global news, business and finance, sports, fashion, food, lifestyle, tech and crypto news, and they can easily customize their stream.”

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Brave automatically generates that stream from hundreds of popular RSS feeds using an algorithm that it says weighs several factors, including the user’s browser history and article published date. But yes, you can customize it by adding or removing sources and categories of content. And a future release will let you manually add favorite RSS feeds.

The bigger deal, of course, is how Brave Today protects your privacy with the use of a private CDN to anonymously deliver RSS feeds to the browser. As Brave notes, “there is no data trail available for third parties to collect or track. This makes Brave Today a unique news reading experience when compared to other apps and platforms that track users’ reading activities. Nobody can track the content that Brave users are reading, including Brave itself.”

Brave Today is available now in the Brave browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, and iOS.

You can learn more about Brave from the firm’s website.

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Conversation 6 comments

  • Nic

    Premium Member
    10 December, 2020 - 7:30 pm

    <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">"Brave automatically generates that stream from hundreds of popular RSS feeds using an algorithm that it says weighs several factors, including the user’s browser history"</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">This mean that Brave is pulling browser history to their servers? </span></p>

  • wright_is

    Premium Member
    11 December, 2020 - 3:00 am

    <p>Damn, so not a news reader, but a private news feed…</p><p>I was excited for a minute, I thought I could drop Thunderbird.</p>

  • MikeCerm

    12 December, 2020 - 1:08 pm

    <p>This sounds like, "we track you and deliver news to you, so others can't track you" to me. It's the same thing that Apple does. They restrict the information that apps are allowed to collect, but they don't put any restriction on themselves. Brave whole business model is that Brave blocks ads, which denies revenue to websites, and then they ransoms those ad dollars back to them in the form of BAT revenue share. I'm saying nobody should block ads, but Brave's business model is definitely shady.</p><p><br></p><p>I haven't looked at how they're doing this "anonymously," but given Brave's weird fascination with crypto currencies — BAT, Binance, and listing crypto news among their topics of interest, like it's a thing anyone should care about — and the time they got caught rewriting links, makes me really distrustful of Brave. I still use it for certain things because sometimes you need a Chromium-based browser and the other options are Google, Microsoft, and Opera (who has been doing shady things more and more since being bought by a Chinese investment firm). I don't particularly trust any of them the way I trust Mozilla.</p>

    • Greg Green

      12 December, 2020 - 3:06 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#599497">In reply to MikeCerm:</a></em></blockquote><p>Sadly we’re going to down a road to fewer choices.</p>

    • Paul Thurrott

      Premium Member
      13 December, 2020 - 8:26 am

      Brave literally says that “Nobody can track the content that Brave users are reading, including Brave itself.”

      I guess we can debate business models, but I have a hard time understanding this criticism. They’re trying to fix the web. It’s a long shot for sure.

  • zermikesevorg

    14 December, 2020 - 1:26 pm

    <p>But why not on Android, seems a weird limitation, or is it an issue since chromium is so deeply integrated?</p>

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