TL;DR: Web Browser Privacy: What Do Browsers Say When They Phone Home? by Douglas J. Leith from the School of Computer Science & Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, is a 14-page study examing Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Brave, Edge, and Yandex. “Our aim is to assess the privacy risks associated with this back-end data exchange,” Leith explained.

Browser Privacy Study: Brave Beats Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, & Yandex

Among the criteria in choosing a browser, privacy ranks rather high among cryptocurrency enthusiasts. “We find that the browsers split into three distinct groups from this privacy perspective,” Leith noted. “In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the second Chrome, Firefox and Safari and in the third (least private) group lie Edge and Yandex.”

Safari defaults to a poor choice of start page that leaks information to multiple third parties and allows them to set cookies without any user consent. Safari otherwise made no extraneous network connections and transmitted no persistent identifiers, but allied iCloud processes did make connections containing identifiers.

Brave began to gain buzz in 2015 as the brainchild of former Mozilla CEO and creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich. He and Brave since have its Chromium-based browser business model into blocking advertisements and trackers, and even has a rather popular cryptocurrency, Basic Attention Token (BAT), traded on exchanges and between Brave users and content creators. Brave is also, according to Leith, stingy in giving up unique user identification compared to its competition.

“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,” Leith concluded. “Chrome, Firefox and Safari all share details of web pages visited with backend servers. For all three this happens via the search autocomplete feature, which

sends web addresses to backend servers in realtime as they are typed. In addition, Firefox includes identifiers in its telemetry transmissions that can potentially be used to link these over time.”

Some Features are Opt-Out for Tech-Savvy Users

In fairness, some features like telemetry can be opt-out if users are aware and tech-savvy enough to disable them. However, popular browsers such as Firefox maintain “an open websocket for push notifications that is linked to a unique identifier and so potentially can also be used for tracking and which cannot be easily disabled,” the study found.

“Safari defaults to a poor choice of start page that leaks information to multiple third parties and allows them to set cookies without any user consent. Safari otherwise made no extraneous network connections and transmitted no persistent identifiers, but allied iCloud processes did make connections containing identifiers,” Leith contrasted.

Yandex and Edge are characterized in the study as “qualitatively different from the other browsers studied. Both send persistent identifiers than can be used to link requests (and associated IP address/location) to back end servers. Edge also sends the hardware [universally unique identifier] of the device to Microsoft and Yandex similarly transmits a hashed hardware identifier to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot

be disabled by users.”

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