Opinions about Brave Talk?

Privacy Questions
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1

Brave Talk is one of the features or services offered by Brave Software in your browser. I think they use Jitsi as the basis of the service. About the encryption and privacy of the product, they say:

First, all video and audio data transferred by Brave Talk is encrypted using transport layer encryption. This is similar to the way many websites use the HTTPS protocol to protect traffic on public networks (such as a coffee shop’s wifi).
The video and audio of your call is transmitted to other participants via a Video Bridge server managed by 8x8, a Brave partner. When you enable Video Bridge Encryption in Security Options, your browser will exchange keys with the other call participants, and these keys will be used to encrypt the video and audio streams. Only the people who have these keys will be able to see your calls. Since we are assuming semi-honest behavior, by default, neither Brave nor its partner 8x8 will have this key.
However, Video Bridge encryption has some important limitations. If you want a participant to join the call with a phone, have more than 20 participants, or want to include people using incompatible browsers (Safari, most iOS browsers, and browsers based on Chromium version 83, or earlier), this type of encryption will not work. If you record a call, the 8x8 servers will receive a set of keys to decrypt the video/audio stream in order to process and store the recording. Brave will continue to improve the properties of Brave’s Chat encryption and work to address some of these limitations.

You have the free version, which allows up to a maximum of 4 participants per call, and has feature restrictions, and then the Pro version, which allows up to 100 participants in the call and removes the usage restrictions. The only requirement to use the service is that the call manager must have Brave installed. That may sound bad to some, but to me it seems like a great incentive to try the browser and attract more people to give it a try.

In general, I don’t think it looks bad. It is true that the project is still “in its infancy”, but it is certainly much better than commonly used software in these situations, such as Google Meet or Skype, in terms of privacy.
But hey, I’m sure you will find nuances in it, and I appreciate that. What do you think?

2

It’s not clear whether this is being suggested as an addition to Privacy Guides or if you’re just asking about the service. If you’re making a suggestion, we should adjust the category of the post to Site Development/Suggestions.

In any case, we used to list Jitsi but removed it because it has not had an external audit, as far as I can remember.

I did some research and unless I’m missing something, that hasn’t changed at this point, so it is unlikely we can recommend Brave Talk right now, given that it uses Jitsi itself.

3

I will take this opportunity to mention Brave Talk in this thread. I think it should also be included.