[eredengrin]

Yeah in my view there are 2 main problems with ads. One is as you say - collecting data profiles of people that are shared around with no respect for the user's preferences. The other is they are an unpleasant experience (resource hogs, obscure the content, etc). In my understanding, brave actually tries addressing both. For the issue of data collection, I believe its goal is to eventually enable (if it hasn't already) local profiling, so that you can still build profiles, but none of the data ever leaves your machine (and presumably they'd allow you to disable this feature - also it's open source so worst case you could always hack it out). For the user experience, since the ads (if you enable them) are served locally, they don't incur the same level of performance penalty as normal ads. Or (I believe) you can also just buy bat separate without ever enabling ads and use those to contribute to content creators (this is probably how I'd use it). I might have gotten a few details wrong but I think the overall direction is definitely worth exploring.

As for blocking the existing ads until the unlikely future where the brave style of ads becomes so common that the ads as we know them today entirely disappear - that's definitely a valid question. It doesn't help to be on the brave model if websites are still able to collect your data anyway. I think brave might have some special features helping obscure the data but I'm not too knowledgeable on that.