Brave browser tops privacy charts

Douglas Leith of Trinity College Dublin has authored a report which finds the six most popular web browsers—including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge—all share your personal details with the companies that own them, along with data identifying the location of the user.

The only browser which preserves user privacy and doesn’t send data back to the mother company is Brave.

"Brave is by far the most private of the browsers studied," writes Leith. "We did not find any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP addresses over time, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited with backend servers."

Edge and Yandex offer the least privacy

Most web browsers are designed to store data like browsing history and login credentials for convenience. This is automatically transmitted back to the company, where it is stored on servers, and can be shared with government agencies or commercial partners — or even fall into the wrong hands in a data breach.

The study finds that Microsoft Edge and Yandex are the "least private" browsers, below Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, and Brave is the only browser that did not share details of visited web pages with backend servers.

"From a privacy perspective, Microsoft Edge and Yandex are much more worrisome than the other browsers studied," Leith writes.

This recognition represents an early win for the privacy-focused Brave Browser, which launched its full 1.0 version in November 2019 after spending several years in Beta.

With 8 million monthly users at last count, Brave’s user base remains a fraction of Chrome’s billion-plus. But the innovative browser model, which uses the Basic Attention Token (BAT) to drive revenue, appears to be gaining traction.

Charts on the tracking site BATGrowth show a healthy upward curve. The number of publishers using the ad network has reached over 370,000 as of January 2020, and this is matched by a steady increase in the number of wallet addresses on the BAT network.