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How Brave Software Keeps Its Users and Search Engine Safe

Brave Software needed scalable solutions to protect users from harmful content across languages. ActiveFence helped automate detection and moderation, ensuring a safer browsing experience.

At a Glance Brave Software, known for its web browser and privacy-preserving search engine, Brave Search, is dedicated to providing a safe and secure online experience for users. Yet, as a young company with lean resources, they faced the challenge of protecting its global user base from harmful content such as malicious URLs, explicit material, and unsafe domains, at scale. To address these challenges, Brave Software partnered with ActiveFence to streamline their moderation process and ensure a safer browsing experience.

Company Info

PROFILE
Brave Software is a technology company focused on privacy-first web browsing and search solutions, offering a secure and ad-free online experience for users worldwide.
INDUSTRY
Search Technology

The Challenge

With high volumes of content in multiple languages, Brave Software faced a critical challenge: safeguarding users from harmful content like Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) , adult content, and malicious domains. Working with the scale of all of the internet’s content, the detection challenge was further magnified by the aggressive tactics used by malicious actors to promote harmful content that could be picked up on search engines.

“We were facing a challenge moderating across many languages and regions,” says Javier Lopez, Search Quality Consultant at Brave Software, whose role includes assuring the quality of the search results are safe for its users.

With lean resources and no in-house linguistic experts, it became challenging to stay ahead of harmful queries and violative URLs in multiple languages. Brave Software did not want to risk exposing its users to harmful content and risking its brand reputation.

"We needed to ensure no CSAM or adult content would be present, especially to minors," says Lopez. This was specifically important for their safe-search settings, which help protect children from violative content online. As such, he looked for a partner that could detect this type of harmful content in multiple languages, and the necessary scale and speed.

Company Info

PROFILE
Brave Software is a technology company focused on privacy-first web browsing and search solutions, offering a secure and ad-free online experience for users worldwide.
INDUSTRY
Search Technology

The Solution

Lopez turned to ActiveFence to enhance the safe browsing experience. “While our main goal is to provide relevant results to user queries, we also need to offer a safe searching and browsing experience,” says Lopez. “That’s where ActiveFence came into play.”

After a short integration process, ActiveFence implemented its intel-fueled, AI-powered detection models to scan search results and identify any violative CSAM or adult content across its URLs, images, or queries. This included multilingual coverage, including detection in English, Spanish, German, and French.

One of the models is ActiveFence’s novel CSAM model. Trained on over six years of in-house domain expertise, this model went beyond simple hash-matching to detect novel CSAM violations, as well as multilingual terms and specific keywords or emojis used to evade detection.

CSAM and other violative content is then sent to ActiveOS in real time, where it is filtered into customized moderator queues by priority, risk and language.

“The filters in ActiveOS provide all the criteria I need to give me a better control of the data I moderate,” says Lopez.

This includes creating custom fields to determine if the content is a URL, domain, or image. He also uses custom queues to tackle the highest risk violations swiftly, such as flagged content, or CSAM-related violations.

"Moderation has become easier since working with ActiveFence,” says Lopez, highlighting how straightforward the content review process is on the platform. This has helped him scale moderation efforts, without increasing his team size.

The Impact

Since implementing ActiveFence, Brave Software has seen a reduction in high-risk harms across multiple languages. Lopez has also managed to scale moderation efforts, providing wider coverage, without spending more resources or time.

"One of the main advantages is actually saving time,” says Lopez. “Having an easy-to-use platform where I can easily check results, with fewer false positives to weed through, helps make my work more efficient.”

By continuously working with ActiveFence, Brave Software has been able to detect multilingual violative content faster, something they wouldn’t have been able to with their limited in-house linguistic capabilities.

“Over 95% of items are accurate,” says Lopez, who says the confidence of detection has helped improve moderation efficiency, and provide his users with a safe browsing experience.

Javier Paredes López

One of the main advantages with ActiveFence is actually saving time. Having an easy-to-use platform where I can easily check results, with fewer false positives to weed through, helps make my work more efficient.

Javier Paredes López

Search Quality Consultant

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