Brave Browser Emerges as the Number #1, Beating Firefox, Opera, and Chrome in Japan

The budding privacy-focused Brave Browser with its own native cryptocurrency Basic Attention Token (BAT) has become widely popular in Japan.

According to a Reddit post, the Android version of Brave browser has claimed the first spot in Japan, up 11 points.

Moreover, the Redditor also stated that it is enjoying 2 million monthly downloads now.

In January this year, Brave also reported of the browser reaching the milestone of 5.5 monthly active users.

Its verified content creators list is also fast-growing, with the number going over 258,000 including The Washington Post, The Guardian, Coinmarketcap, and others. Recently, Brave announced a partnership with The Wiki Foundation as well.

Meanwhile, Firefox, Opera, and Chrome have slid down the line at 15 (losing 1 point) and 48 (losing 2 points) and 49 (down 11 points).

Given the fact that Japan has a population of 126 million, Brave has a huge potential and opportunity to gather a larger market share.

However, Google, the main competitor of Brave browser still captures more than half (63.99 per cent) of the market share, as per StatCounter.

Safari accounts for 15.48% share while others like Firefox, Samsung Internet, UC Browser, and Opera has less than 5 percent of the market share in August.

Ensuring User Privacy: Google Circumventing EU Privacy Regulations

The company is extremely serious about users’ privacy and it doesn't restrict to only ensuring that they are working on boosting it on its platform but also outing others if they aren’t.

Recently, Brave alleged that Google is circumventing EU privacy regulations (GDPR) by using hidden web pages to feed personal data of its users to advertisers.

The evidence that is now with Irish data regulator reportedly accuses the tech giant of allowing its users to be profiled, as such having targeted advertisements.

Brave’s chief policy officer Johnny Ryan discovered that Google had:

“labelled him with an identifying tracker that it fed to third-party companies that logged on to a hidden web page.”

The web page allegedly has no content but contained a “unique address” that links directly to a user’s browsing activity.

After a month of testing Google, adtech analytics found that Google’s “secret web page identifiers” are actually unique to each user.

However, a Google spokesperson said,

“We do not serve personalized ads or send bid requests to bidders without user consent.”

Google is reportedly cooperating with the Data Protection Commission, Ireland’s data regulator in its investigation.