Counting with STAR: Shipping a Privacy-Preserving Telemetry System to Millions of Users

This talk will focus on how Brave researched, developed and scaled an efficient and cheap privacy-preserving telemetry system (called STAR) which formalizes privacy guarantees related to data collection. STAR presents developers with parameters which can be tuned depending on the sensitivity of the data being collected, and unlocks a wide variety of use-cases which were previously too risky to consider. The talk starts by describing how we evaluated currently deployed options and why they were insufficient. Then, we will talk about the applied research => shipping in production pipeline and give examples of the various use-cases solved by a privacy-friendly telemetry system, and conclude with lessons learned along the way and how we would do things differently in the future.