SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A new study Web Browser Privacy: What Do Browsers Say When They Phone Home?, looked at the six popular desktop web browsers Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based), Apple Safari, Brave, and Yandex, to uncover what these browsers send back to the mothership.
If you just want the result, the study found that used out of the box, Brave "is by far the most private of the browsers studied" followed by Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Brave is the only web browser that did not use identifiers that allowed tracking of the IP address over time and did not share details of web pages visited to backend servers.
Where is my Moon?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
New Study Finds Most Private Browser
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 24 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Cum tacent, clamant. When they are silent, they shout. -Cicero
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2020, @07:52AM
Tor Browser also included a LOT of privacy changes to make every user appear identical:
User-agent is standardized on a specific ESR. Cookies only last for a session, as does html5. It warns about attempts to set a canvas value. And it won't operate at all if Tor isn't running and properly configured. Furthermore it disallows localhost and file access without manually selecting and pressing enter in the url bar. Basically every trick possible to avoid both identitication and tracking, as well as efforts to avoid cross site scripting attacks on local/privileged access mechanisms.
That said, it holds cookies and html5 state for the entire private browsing session, and due to the way firefox 'Private Mode' works, addons such as uMatrix cannot actually purge the cookies set while in private mode, so you have to disable cookies by default if you want to avoid most forms of tracking within the same session, even if you close all windows pertaining to a website and reload it via a url or fresh link. And yes I reported this as a bug. Both Tor Browser Bundle and Mozilla upstream closed it (my bug on TBB wasn't the first, and the comments on both TBB and Mozilla's Firefox bugzilla stated it was not a bug and the correct way is to restart the browser for TBB and close *ALL* private mode sessions for Firefox. I am unsure if firefox requires a restart of the browser to avoid them carrying over to a 'new' private mode session in an existing non-private session. As a result neither Firefox non-private, Firefox private, nor Tor Browser Bundle completely avoids tracking on all possible fronts, excluding new identifying leaks implemented in new versions of the browser engine.