Browser Privacy – Brave Drops Off!

Trinity College Dublin’s President of Computer Systems Dr. Douglas Leith has published a study on the privacy of browsers. He compared Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge and Yandex in terms of the amount of personal data they transmit to backend servers. The conclusion of the study was that Brave is by far the most efficient browser regarding the protection of personal data.

The study shows:

“Used with its default settings, Brave is by far the most private of the browsers studied. We did not find any use of identifiers that would allow IP tracking over time and no distribution of the details of web pages visited with backend servers. “

Browser privacy

Dr. Leith has also ranked the most popular browsers according to how they distribute their personal information. Brave ranks first in the privacy category, followed by Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

All three browsers have “browser-logged identifiers,” which persist even when the browser is restarted. The only way they can be removed is by re-installation.

Edge and Yandex were ranked last, as both browsers have persistent hardware identifiers that cannot be revoked or reinstalled. The verdict for these is worrying:

“Both send identifiers that are connected to the hardware of the device and thus persist even when the browser is reinstalled. Edge sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft. Similarly, Yandex transmits a hash of the hardware serial number and MAC address to the back-end servers. Our analysis reveals that this behavior cannot be disabled by users. “

According to recent statistics, the most used desktop browser is Chrome, with a market share of 67%, followed by Firefox, Safari, Edge, Internet Exporer and Opera.

Brave currently has 8.7 million daily users, according to statistics published by the company.