I appreciate and respect what the GDPR was trying to accomplish. The hours of corporate training and “please let us track you with cookies, we pinky-promise we need them” messages that appear on nearly every website? Not so much. Now, the latest version of the Brave browser hopes to get rid of them—the pop-ups, not the training—with a new tool.
The developers are calling it “Cookiecrumbler,” a method for detecting and blocking the ubiquitous cookie consent notices across the web with a variety of approaches. The thing is, blocking these pop-ups was already built into Brave… but blocking the pop-ups wasn’t the biggest problem. According to the announcement post (spotted by BleepingComputer), it’s doing so without breaking the page afterward. It requires an approach that’s almost tailored to each individual site, as these notices are similar but not identical across the web.
Cookiecrumbler aggregates auto-detection with large language models (“AI”), combined with human reviewers who can iron out the wrinkles where the LLM makes mistakes in detection or automatic translation. The tool is running on Brave’s backend servers at the moment so it can crawl the web and set up rules on a site-by-site basis. The team says it wants to switch things into a browser-based version eventually.
The best news? Brave is publishing Cookiecrumbler as an open-source tool, so it could be implemented and iterated by other teams. If you prefer another alternative browser (like my personal fave Vivaldi) or you’re uncomfortable with some of Brave’s (ahem) less altruistic moves, you could see Cookiecrumbler pop up in your browser of choice soon.
