Privacy is about individual autonomy and your right to be left alone. Knowledge about you grants some measure of power over you. Governments use information to arrest people, and place them on lists of who should and shouldn’t be able to exercise other basic rights. Corporations want to influence you in all sorts of ways: how you live, what you want, how you vote... And even individual people spy in order to blackmail, stalk, threaten, or peep. Privacy allows you to go about your life without having to constantly worry about how your actions will be misinterpreted or used against you in future. In a very real way, privacy gives you the freedom to be yourself

Yes — Brave is free! You’ll always be able to use Brave without paying in either money or your personal information. Shields protects you from tracking as you browse the web. Brave Rewards lets you earn tokens by viewing ads and pays it forward to the people who create the stuff you love online. All for free. If you want to support sites in Brave without earning tokens through ads then you’ll have to use your own money.

Brave blocks invasive ads by default. If you turn on Brave Rewards, you can earn tokens for viewing Brave Ads. These ads aren’t like the ones you see on the web. They’re completely private: none of your personal info, browsing history or anything else ever leaves your device. That’s because Brave downloads the whole ad catalogue and selects the right ads for you locally on your device. And when you see an ad Brave picks for you, you earn 70% of what the advertiser paid, guaranteed. Brave Ads look like system notifications. They’re not distracting or intrusive, and they’re not mixed in with the pages you read online. And you get to pick how many, and how often to see them.

When you use Brave Rewards, you earn Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) for each privacy-respecting ad Brave shows you. A typical, engaged person who uses Brave as their everyday browser can expect to earn about $5 of BAT a month. This figure will vary over time and by region, depending on a variety of factors.

Yes! Brave works with all the same extensions and themes as Chrome. Brave is based on the same open-source Chromium code as a number of other browsers, so your favorite extensions just work with Brave. We don’t host our own extensions store though, so for now the best place to find extensions is the Chrome Web Store. Extensions are powerful ways to improve your Brave experience, but that power comes with responsibility. A malicious extension can seriously compromise your privacy and safety. Brave has taken an early look at multiple extensions to make sure they don’t have any of the most common problems — and Brave will warn you when you try to install an extension that hasn’t been checked out.