EDIT: Study is now over. Thank you all for the help.
EDIT: Now also compatible with Brave Release versions.
Brave is participating in a User Study organized by the University of Cambridge, aiming to enable privacy-preserving Federated Learning in serving advertisements in a real setting.
We are looking for 500 Brave users of Desktop release (i.e., Windows, macOS, or Linux) for a user study that will enable us to improve our local machine learning models around Brave Ads. You can take part if you are 18 years of age or older, and live in any of the Brave Ads Supported Countries.
We will be looking to respectfully collect low-sensitivity user behavioral data, such as the number of tabs you have open (but not the actual URLs or the page content), what time of the day you clicked on an ad (but not what ad), and how long you waited before dismissing an ad. No personal data or data about your browsing history will be recorded for this user study.
You have complete control and can opt-out at any moment. Your data will be collected locally for 28 days. During this time, you can inspect the data and see what exactly has been collected at any point. You will receive instructions about how to do so. If you’re happy with it, you can then choose to submit it to us for research purposes. The data is only on your device until you choose to send it to us. You can also have a look at the project’s source code on GitHub.
At the end of the study, you can enter our prize raffle for the chance to win one of the twenty (20) $50 Amazon gift vouchers. There’s also a cool POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) NFT (non-fungible token) up for grabs!
More information about the study and how you can participate can be found here.
Just a little feedback. Had someone respond on a Reddit post I made and they were getting a blank page when “trying to sign up.” I checked out https://mlsys.cst.cam.ac.uk/cl-brave-flower and noticed that the link that says Sign up here with your email address for our mailing-list is actually a mailto link. When I clicked it initially, it opened to a blank page as well, but I at least had the prompt below appear:
So I’m guessing some didn’t get that notice. Might want to think of a different method or just provide the email address directly, if people are supposed to be sending emails. Unless that’s part of the screening process, lol.
Hi, I enabled Brave Nightly to participate as a volunteer and I subscribed to the list, at first I received an email welcoming the subscription, but I have not received more information, I enabled it on August 29. Can I now send the collected data?
@minoskt I forget, is it supposed to email us again when it’s time? I ended up signing up for it here on my Desktop once it was able to run on Release version. Quite frankly, I kind of forget when I activated it. Definitely going to have to dig through emails to see what it said when I signed up for it, hoping I didn’t accidentally delete it, lol.
Hi, I would like to participate, but I am likely to change my laptop in a few weeks. Would this be an obstacle to this, given the data to be collected?
Unfortunately it is since all data are being collected locally. As long as you can keep using the laptop as your main machine for four weeks you should be fine.
Alternatively, you can extract the data from both machines (email with instructions will arrive tomorrow), and join them manually. Happy to help with that if you want.
Indeed. The data submission will take place using a survey type of portal. The data are extracted into a csv file. You can extract data from both machines, merge them (i.e., append the content of the 2nd file), and submit a single csv file.
