If you’ve been following our blog, you know that Google doesn’t care about your privacy. Although its Chrome browser is definitely the most popular, it collects a lot of data about you such as your browsing history and search queries.
Chrome is also designed to work with Google Services like Google Search, making it even easier to collect user data about you, which it then stores on its own servers. It’s also vulnerable to “browser fingerprinting”.
Luckily there are Chromium-based browsers, which take your privacy seriously.
What’s Chromium?
Google developed Chrome based on an open-source codebase called Chromium. The codebase is freely available online for other developers to use, which formed the basis for other browsers like Microsoft Edge and Brave.
What’s Brave Browser?
Brave Browser is also an open-source project: this gives the best guarantee of security as the coding community can check the source code to make sure there are no security flaws, data harvesting or even coded “backdoors” to steal your information.
It was originally developed by Brendan Eich, who’s the co-founder of Mozilla and the creator of the JavaScript programming language.
Most importantly it’s one of a handful of web browsers whose main focus is on protecting your privacy.
Some of Brave’s best features include:
Built-in AdBlocker
Adverts are usually no more than an annoyance but can sometimes contain links to malware or spyware. There’s no need to install an extra extension to block ads in Brave: it does it out of the box. This is provided by Brave’s “Shields” feature: you can even click the Brave icon in the address bar to see which ads have been blocked. If a page isn’t loading correctly you can also turn this off on a site-by-site basis.
Cookie Control
Brave Shields also can prevent the loading of third-party cookies from websites you visit. These are usually harmless but can be used to track your activity from one site to the next in order to build a profile on you. By default all “cross-site” cookies like these are disabled.
Fingerprint Prevention
Each time you visit a web page your browser sends a “user agent” string of data with information like your operating system version, supported languages, screen resolution and so on. This information can be collected as you move across websites in order to build a unique ‘fingerprint’.
Brave Browser has built-in protection against common fingerprinting methods such as the ‘Canvas’ method which draws an invisible picture on your screen to measure your graphics card performance.
The browser uses a randomized fingerprint each time you visit a site, which provides excellent protection against being identified this way. You can check this with an online service like EFF’s “Cover Your Tracks”.
Safe Search Engine
Brave uses its own search engine, which offers far more privacy than Google. In the first place, it doesn’t log your search queries or IP address (we can be sure of this as the browser is open source). This means they can’t store, share or sell your user data.
Brave also doesn’t obey a mysterious algorithm when showing you search results: it ranks pages based on anonymous community contributions. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, the desktop version can also run an anonymous Google search for you.
You can also change the default Brave search engine to another like Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo.
What about Chrome extensions?
If you’re a Chrome user, rest assured that as Brave and Chrome share the same codebase, most extensions will work in both browsers.
Remember though that Brave already has an ad-blocker and anti-tracking measures against cookies built-in, so installing extensions that do this could interfere with the way it works.
Brave BATs
Brave’s business model uses BATs (Basic Attention Tokens): this is a form of cryptocurrency that you can store in Brave’s integrated crypto wallet if you wish. BATs are earned by watching ads or otherwise engaging with content created by third parties.
This “paid to surf” model isn’t anything new but the idea of paying people in crypto to do it is quite novel. Still, there’s no need to take part in the BATs program if you don’t want to.
Brave doesn’t hide your IP or browsing data
Brave does support opening “Private” windows, which are equivalent to “Incognito Mode” in that they won’t store any third-party cookies or other browsing data permanently on your device: these are deleted from a temporary cache when the window closes.
Still, this won’t prevent sites you access from logging your IP address when you visit a site. Anyone with access to your ISP’s records will also know that you are connected to it.
Use Brave with a VPN
Although Brave does come with its own VPN on mobile browsers, you’ll need to install a separate app for the desktop version.
If you choose a reliable VPN provider, any internet traffic between your device and the VPN server will be encrypted. This means that your ISP won’t know which sites you visit from the Brave Browser. As you’re connecting to the internet via the VPN server, the IP address of your device will also be hidden.
Getting Started with Brave
If you’d like to give Brave a try, first visit https://brave.com/download/ in your regular browser to download it. The browser’s available for Windows, macOS and Linux. If you’re using a mobile device, you can also install Brave via the Google Play or Apple App stores.
If your old browser supports exporting bookmarks and settings to an HTML file, then Brave can import this, so you don’t have to set up everything up all over again.
When you first launch Brave, we recommend setting up Sync. This will encrypt and share your settings like bookmarks and passwords between all your devices running the Brave Browser. This data is encrypted on your device, so not even Brave can see your passwords, bookmarks and extensions.
Once you’ve done this, don’t forget to visit the Brave website for more information on privacy features.
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