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Does Brave still fail fingerprinting tests in a comically bad fashion? Last time I looked at Brave, it appeared to be pretty bad for privacy fingerprinting-wis

Does Brave still fail fingerprinting tests in a comically bad fashion? Last time I looked at Brave, it appeared to be pretty bad for privacy fingerprinting-wise compared to Firefox and (surprisingly) Chrome.

pes10k 7y ago
Hi, I do privacy research at Brave. Our fingerprinting protections are still being improved (our second round of FP defenses should hit nightly in Jan), but the comments here are wrong; our defenses are much better than Firefox and Chrome. We don't consider as part of our threat model preventing sites from knowing you're using Brave. I'm not aware of any browser or tool that considers this as part of their privacy threat model either (including the terrific Tor Browser Bundle). Our goal is to prevent sites from distinguishing between Brave users. My claim is that our fingerprinting protections are strictly stronger than Firefox and Chrome. A partial list of fingerprinting protections that are enabled by default in Brave are at [1]. Fingerprinting is tricky, and we're tacking the problem in on multiple dimensions. We need to go further, and expect to have v2 of our defenses in nightly in the next month or two [2], but we're also leading efforts in W3C to address fingerprinting in standards (I'm snyderp, those are my / Brave issues identifying privacy harm in standards) [3], and we're pushing hard to prevent web standards and privacy efforts from being eaten up by vaporware [4]. So, all that is to say, Brave has the most aggressive fingerprinting protections of any general purpose browser, and is getting better. The naysayers are welcome to backup their claims ;) 1: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Fingerprinting-Protection-Mode https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Fingerprinting-... 2: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5614 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5614 3: https://github.com/w3cping/tracking-issues/issues https://github.com/w3cping/tracking-issues/issues 4: https://brave.com/brave-fingerprinting-and-privacy-budgets/ https://brave.com/brave-fingerprinting-and-privacy-budgets/
zenexer 7y ago
Yes. Despite their efforts, it remains trivial to detect Brave as well as fingerprint individual users. I’m pretty sure the only reason they don’t expose it in the UA is because you can then calculate just how much of a scam it is. Their payouts are laughably low.
Angeo34 7y ago
This is the sole reason it should be evident to anyone how Brave is just a scam. They took a Browser made tracking it easier and then released it as a private browser. And people genuinely fall for it.
samantohermes 7y ago
Which fingerprinting test? If it's like panopticlick.eff.org, then isn't accurate.

pes10k 7y ago

Hi, I do privacy research at Brave. Our fingerprinting protections are still being improved (our second round of FP defenses should hit nightly in Jan), but the comments here are wrong; our defenses are much better than Firefox and Chrome. We don't consider as part of our threat model preventing sites from knowing you're using Brave. I'm not aware of any browser or tool that considers this as part of their privacy threat model either (including the terrific Tor Browser Bundle). Our goal is to prevent sites from distinguishing between Brave users. My claim is that our fingerprinting protections are strictly stronger than Firefox and Chrome. A partial list of fingerprinting protections that are enabled by default in Brave are at [1]. Fingerprinting is tricky, and we're tacking the problem in on multiple dimensions. We need to go further, and expect to have v2 of our defenses in nightly in the next month or two [2], but we're also leading efforts in W3C to address fingerprinting in standards (I'm snyderp, those are my / Brave issues identifying privacy harm in standards) [3], and we're pushing hard to prevent web standards and privacy efforts from being eaten up by vaporware [4]. So, all that is to say, Brave has the most aggressive fingerprinting protections of any general purpose browser, and is getting better. The naysayers are welcome to backup their claims ;) 1: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Fingerprinting-Protection-Mode https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/wiki/Fingerprinting-... 2: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5614 https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/5614 3: https://github.com/w3cping/tracking-issues/issues https://github.com/w3cping/tracking-issues/issues 4: https://brave.com/brave-fingerprinting-and-privacy-budgets/ https://brave.com/brave-fingerprinting-and-privacy-budgets/

zenexer 7y ago

Yes. Despite their efforts, it remains trivial to detect Brave as well as fingerprint individual users. I’m pretty sure the only reason they don’t expose it in the UA is because you can then calculate just how much of a scam it is. Their payouts are laughably low.

Angeo34 7y ago

This is the sole reason it should be evident to anyone how Brave is just a scam. They took a Browser made tracking it easier and then released it as a private browser. And people genuinely fall for it.

samantohermes 7y ago

Which fingerprinting test? If it's like panopticlick.eff.org, then isn't accurate.