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You can take several steps to protect your privacy as you browse. But when we use the word privacy, we need to clarify what we mean. Most people can quickly identify at least four different types of privacy that may be a concern.

Defining Privacy

First, privacy may mean privacy from other people with access to your device. You might not want the fact that you searched for a gift for someone in your household to be discovered by someone that shares access to your computer. More concerning, a person in an abusive relationship, for example, may not want someone else in the household to know they’ve searched for help.

Second, you could mean that you want privacy between sites you visit. At one point or another, you might notice advertisements for an item you’d searched for now appear on several sites you visit. That’s because activity and ad trackers often operate across multiple sites.

Third, you likely also want privacy over the connections from your device to a website. Your browser relies on your local network connection (often over Wi-Fi), routed through your internet service provider, then over the internet to a destination website. Each step in that process represents a potential place your privacy might leak information.

﻿Fourth, many people also prefer privacy from governments. In some countries, government agencies actively monitor and/or restrict access to information on the internet. Human rights activists, academics, and innovators, each may wish to keep internet browsing activity unknown to officials.

But a fully private web browsing experience that reveals no information whatsoever about you as you browse can be difficult to achieve. Most web browsers reveal at least some basic information to sites you visit. To get some sense of what a site might “know” about you, visit What every Browser knows about you by Robin Linus and Panopticlick from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. You’ll soon see that your browser may reveal your location, device hardware, software, and connection speed. These sites also can show whether or not your browser protects you from tracking ads or invisible trackers.

How Were These Browsers Chosen?

As of 2019, many people use Chrome on desktops, Safari on macOS and iOS, or either Internet Explorer or Edge on Windows systems. While each of these companies takes steps to secure these browsers, people are not able to fully audit the code in these browsers. And since Google, Apple, and Microsoft do not provide access to all of the code, many computer privacy professionals reasonably consider these browser to be less trusted than browsers for which all of the code is publicly available.

The five browsers featured below rely on open source code, with specific customizations and configurations made (or available) in favor of privacy. If you search a bit, you’ll find many more customized versions of browsers built from either the Firefox or Chromium code. The selected browsers are relatively widely used and frequently updated.