Brave blocks cookie banners-and yet everything works

Under the name CookieCrumbler, Brave has released a new open source tool that automatically blocked the cookie banner. The new technical approach of the software is interesting thanks to which the website should work as usual. Conventional blocking tools often shoot the accessed pages, layout elements are missing or shop workflows can no longer be used. Brave has been blocking advertising for better data protection from users for a long time, and cookie banners fall into the same category for the developers.

This circumvents CookieCrumbler with an individual approach: instead of generally blocking all banners, the tool searches the web, identifies the cookie notices and suggests suitable blocking options. “Open Source LELMs” are responsible for this, since this process would be too complex for humans. However, the latter check the results of CookieCrumbler as a maintainer before going live.

Individually adapted blocking

This automated process is based on an adapted tranco list of the most popular websites in a region. Then a script on the brave servers crawl through this list: dolleteer-a headless browser-calls the page, with distributed proxies specifying different locations. The latter ensures that multilingual sides and banner are correctly identified and always work. Cookiecrumbler identifies HTML elements of a possible banner and the LLM checks them. Finally, CookieCrumbler returns the result back to the server.

If you want to see these results, you can do this on GitHub – Brave openly makes it available and hopes according to the announcement Also that the community will help its own Maintainers in the arms in the long term. Previously, the browser developer had tested the software internally under another name and presented the ad filtering dev Summit last year. Since these tests were positive compared to previous blocking approaches, Cookiecrumbler is now generally available.

Only for good

However, the tool in the current status is based on good infrastructure – a direct installation for other browsers is not intended. However, other tools can use the results to block cookie banners. And in the long term, the developers want to bring cookie banners closer to the client. According to the announcement, the prerequisite is that the privacy of the user is preserved.

More technical information about cookiecrumbler can be found on the Github page of the project. The results can be interested On the Issues page see.