Brave Browser’s Configuration is The Best from Chrome, Firefox & Safari, Privacy Study

By Kapil Gauhar

A privacy expert, who analyzed some of the most famous browsers available, reached an unambiguous resolution: Brave trumps competition.

Dr. Douglas Leigth, the chair of computer systems in Trinity College Dublin, authored a study contrasting Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge and Yandex in the form of how much information they share with backend servers. Brave browser’s default configuration was by a wide margin the best of the pack.

The study says –

“Used ‘out of the box’ with its default settings Brave is by far the most private of the browsers studied. We did not find any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address over time, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with backend servers.”

From the Best to the Most Exceedingly Terrible

Besides, the examination puts the six browsers into three different groups ‒ from generally private to the least. Brave is the just one in the primary group — browsers that don’t share personally identifiable data.

Brave was trailed by other participants Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, which all have “identifiers connected to the browser.” These sorts of identifiers, the study states, continue across browser restarts. However, those identifiers are crucially removed after a new browser install.

Edge and Yandex came in dead last. As the two browsers have steady hardware identifiers that can’t be repudiated, even by reinstalling the browser. The decision for this 3rd group is considerably worrisome –

“Both send identifiers that are linked to the device hardware and so persist across fresh browser installs <>. Edge sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft <>. Similarly, Yandex transmits a hash of the hardware serial number and MAC address to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users.”

Brave Browser is a Strong Privacy Defender

As previously reported, Brave is putting pressure on the UK authorities to clamp down on tech giants, for example, Google for shockingly abusing the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Privacy advocates will be glad to realize that Brave gets the ball rolling.