Blogs

STAR: Brave’s new system for privacy-preserving data collection

Jul 19, 2022

Brave's new system STAR protects user privacy by ensuring the data users contribute are never unique to that user. This property, sometimes called k-anonymity, ensures that the data collector can only see a submitted value if the same value has also been submitted by some number of other users.

Protecting against browser-language fingerprinting

Apr 1, 2022

Brave has further strengthened its fingerprinting protections by preventing users from being identified based on preferred browser language. Starting with version 1.39, Brave randomizes how your browser informs sites of what language(s) you’ve set as default, and what fonts you have installed on your system.

"Unlinkable bouncing" for more protection against bounce tracking

Mar 8, 2022

Brave is shipping a new, powerful privacy-protecting feature called Unlinkable Bouncing. This feature protects your privacy by noticing when you're about to visit a privacy harming site, and instead routes that visit through a new, temporary browser storage.

Partitioning network-state for privacy

Dec 22, 2021

Brave now includes network-state partitioning features, protecting Brave users from an even greater range of online tracking techniques.

Preventing pool-party attacks

Dec 15, 2021

Brave has identified a new category of tracking vulnerability, forms of which are present in all browsers. We call this category of attack “pool-party” attacks because the attack uses collections (or “pools”) of limited-but-shared resources to create side channels.

Debouncing

Oct 14, 2021

Brave is releasing additional protections against certain forms of bounce tracking. We call these new protections "debouncing". As of desktop version 1.32, Brave will protect users against bounce tracking by recognizing when the user is about to visit a known tracking domain, skipping visiting the tracking site all together, and instead directly navigating the user to the intended destination.

Custom filter list subscriptions

Sep 21, 2021

Starting in version 1.31, Brave will support custom filter list subscriptions, allowing users to further control how unwanted network requests and in-page elements are blocked in Brave. This work is part of Brave’s goal of providing best-of-breed content filtering tools, and keeping people in control of their Web browsing.

Improving privacy by improving Web compatibility

Sep 1, 2021

Brave is disabling filter list blocking for first-party subresources to improve privacy for typical Brave users. Advanced users still have the ability to deploy more aggressive privacy protections, even those that might break sites.

Ephemeral third-party site storage

Feb 1, 2021

This post presents “ephemeral site storage”, a new strategy for managing third-party storage in Brave, designed to improve Web compatibility, while maintaining the same level of privacy protection.

Fighting CNAME trickery

Jul 20, 2020

Trackers are constantly working on new techniques for evading privacy tools, and keep deploying new ways to evade privacy-protecting tools like the Brave browser. This post discusses a recent technique trackers use, CNAME cloaking, and a new feature in Brave that keeps Brave users protected.

Grab bag: query stripping, referrer policy, and reporting API

Jul 20, 2020

In order to stay one step ahead of online trackers, Brave regularly releases new privacy features and improvements. This post discusses three recent changes in Brave that each help make the web a more privacy, and person, respecting platform.

Fingerprinting defenses 2.0

May 18, 2020

Brave's goal is to both be the best browser for protecting your privacy, and the best browser for day-to-day, full-featured Web use. This post describes new privacy features being developed in Brave to better protect user privacy, without breaking privacy-respecting, user-serving websites.

Fingerprint randomization

Mar 5, 2020

Brave now protects users from being fingerprinted by making them appear subtly different to each website. Browser fingerprinting protection is available today in our Nightly version. These new protections both provide the strongest fingerprinting protections of any popular browser, and work without introducing bothersome permission prompts or breaking websites.