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Comment by byte_0

21 hours ago

I have heard from some power users that Brave is one of the best browsers with regard to ad-blocking and privacy. But I think I have read elsewhere that it receives money from ad companies to display only certain ads, which does not make me trust it. Does anyone have facts or know where to find them?

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byte_0

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asdf88990  21 hours ago

As a general role, always be suspicious of very loud and vocal opinions about product and services. Specially for closed source products and paid services, they often invest in what is called Native Advertisement/Marketing which is basically paying people to lie and pretend it is organic content/opinion.

Second, despite the dumpsterfire that Mozilla’s leadership has been in a decade or so, it is very robust with privacy and anti fingerprint features out of the box, the containers has also stabilised and works great.

pnw  20 hours ago

Brave outperforms Firefox on the EFF fingerprinting test at https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

Using Brave EFF reports that I have a randomized fingerprint.

Using Firefox or Edge EFF reports I have a unique fingerprint

  • nvme0n1p1  19 hours ago

    I see so many misconceptions on HN about that coveryourtracks site. Neither of those results are ideal.

    "randomized fingerprint" -> that's a bad result, it means the site can detect you're spoofing info

    "unique fingerprint" -> this is good, ONLY IF you refresh and it still says "unique fingerprint", because it means the site sees you as a brand new visitor each visit, and doesn't detect any (what advertisers would call) nefarious behavior. however, if you visit again and the second time it says "nearly-unique fingerprint", that's a fail because your two visits were linked

    The ideal result you should aim for is "non-unique fingerprint". That means your device is indistinguishable from countless others. Blending in to the crowd is what you want.

  • unicornfinder  20 hours ago

    These tests aren't reliable - Brave does randomise values but it ultimately doesn't do much to prevent fingerprinting, as many values remain static. For example, Brave still exposes your GPU model and driver version.

    See Fingerprint.com, despite Brave's protections you'll likely find it works reliably.