







This is what the School of Science & Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, concluded upon in their study on the privacy of several internet browser. The Browsers Studied: Chrome, Safari, Brave, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, and Yandex.





Their goal was to "assess the privacy risks associated with this backend data exchange". These are the questions that they are trying to answer: " (1) Does this data allow servers to track the IP address of the browser instance over time, even providing a rough estimate? (2) Does the browser leak details of the web pages visited?"





All of these tests done were easily replicated across all of the browsers and are done on 2 Macbooks and in the EU Country.





Without going through all of the details of the research paper found here , they have concluded that:





"Used “out of the box” with its default settings Brave is by far the most private of the browsers studied. 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".





All While:





" Chrome, Firefox and Safari all tag data with identifiers that

are linked to the browser instance (i.e. which persist across

browser restarts but are reset upon a fresh browser install).

All three share details of web pages visited with backend

servers. This happens via the search autocomplete feature,

which sends web addresses to backend servers in realtime as

they are typed."





Worse Yet:





"From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are

much more worrisome than the other browsers studied. Both

send identifiers that are linked to the device hardware and so

persist across fresh browser installs and can also be used to

link different apps running on the same device. Edge sends

the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft, a strong and

enduring identifier than cannot be easily changed or deleted.

Similarly, Yandex transmits a hash of the hardware serial

number and MAC address to back end servers. As far as we

can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users."





To read the full research report, click here.





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Thanks for Reading!