A study was performed against the top browsers to see which was the most secure/private. And I will safe the suspense but Brave is the most private of them all. The following browsers were tested: Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Safari, Yandex, and Edge.
So out of all of them Microsoft Edge and Yandex are the worst. They both send back unique identifiers to their servers. So it persists across different installations. Edge sends back your hardware UUID to themselves. Yandex send back a hash of your hardware serial number and MAC address to themselves. They both also send web page information to servers that don't appears to be related to search autocomplete. So that's a little shady. The study could not find a way to stop this either.
Now Firefox, Safari and Chrome all user unique identifiers that are linked to the browser instance so they persist over each session. They also share webpage details with their own servers.
Now comes Brave browser. Let's just quote the report because it's straight to the point.
For Brave with its default settings we did not find
any use of identifiers allowing tracking of IP address over
time, and no sharing of the details of web pages visited
with backend servers.
What this means is that out of the box Brave does not track you or keep any information about you when you surf the web. It truly is the most private browser. The other browsers by default track you more than you probably realize. And sure some of it could be turned off but the vast majority of browser users would have no idea that those browsers are doing that.
What was the tests performed?
These steps were done for each browser and multiple times for each.
- Start the browser from a fresh clean install and a new user profile.
- Paste a URL into the address bar and press Enter. Then record the user activity.
- Close the browser and restart it, then test the network activity.
- Start the browser from a fresh install and a new user profile and then monitor network traffic for 24 hours.
- Start the browser from a fresh install and a new user profile, type in a URL and monitor network traffic.
