Brave blocks cookie banners – and everything still works

Under the name Cookiecrumbler, Brave has released a new open-source tool that automatically blocks cookie banners. What is interesting is the new technical approach of the software, thanks to which websites should function as usual. Conventional blocking tools often destroy the pages accessed, layout elements are missing, or store workflows can no longer be used. Brave has been blocking advertising for better user data protection for some time, and cookie banners fall into the same category for developers.

Cookiecrumbler avoids this with an individual approach: instead of generally blocking all banners, the tool scours the web, identifies the cookie notices and suggests suitable blocking options. Open source LLMs are responsible for this, as this process would be too time-consuming for humans. However, the latter, as maintainers, check the results of Cookiecrumbler before they go live.

Customized blocking

This automated process is based on a customized Tranco list of the most popular websites in a region. A script on the Brave servers then crawls through this list: Puppeteer – a headless browser – accesses the page, with distributed proxies specifying different locations. The latter ensures that multilingual pages and banners are correctly identified and always work. Cookiecrumbler identifies HTML elements of a possible banner and the LLM checks them. Finally, Cookiecrumbler passes the result back to the server.

Anyone who wants to view these results can do so on GitHub – Brave makes them openly available and, according to the announcement, also hopes that the community will support its maintainers in the long term. The browser developer had previously tested the software internally under a different name and presented it at the Ad Filtering Dev Summit last year. As these tests were positive in comparison to previous blocking approaches, Cookiecrumbler is now generally available.

Only for Brave

However, the tool currently relies on Brave's own infrastructure at –. There are no plans to install it directly for other browsers. 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. However, according to the announcement, the prerequisite is that the privacy of the user remains protected.

More technical information about Cookiecrumbler can be found on the project's GitHub page. Interested parties can view the results on the issues page.

(fo)