[plaguepilled]

The short answer is that yes, Brave as a company does have some competing incentives which rightly should be constantly criticised, HOWEVER, Brave the browser performs well in multiple independent reviews of browser privacy. A nice one is https://privacytests.org/, though there are also some academic studies which I will link if I find.

[rvnx]

"Independent tests"

PrivacyTests.org is run by a Brave employee (Arthur Edelstein)

He is extremely smart person though, just that money can taint any good intentions easily. Especially in a very "shark" ecosystem.

[1shooner]

His disclosure statement, FWIW:

>Full disclosure and transparency

>(Updated June 2022)

>This website and the browser privacy tests are an independent project by me, Arthur Edelstein. I have developed this project on my own time and on my own initiative. Several months after first publishing the website, I became an employee of Brave, where I contribute to Brave's browser privacy engineering efforts. I continue to run this website independently of my employer, however. There is no connection with Brave marketing efforts whatsoever.

>I am committed to maintaining this website's accuracy and impartiality. It is my goal not to promote any browser here, but rather to offer objective test results for all browsers that encourages a general improvement in privacy across the industry.

>By keeping this project fully open source, I endeavor to provide the maximum possible transparency and verifiability of the tests and results. Anyone who wishes to check the results can clone the git repository and run the browser tests independently. Ideas for additional tests, or code (pull requests) for additional tests that provide further insight into browser privacy, will be gratefully accepted.

[ColinHayhurst]

Interesting. Wondered why results are displayed there as they are; the ones at the top look bad for Vivaldi, for example. Speaking of which Proton don't include Vivaldi. Perhaps as they have their own email client built right into their browser. Nope, I don't work for Vivaldi. It's one of several that I use.

[plaguepilled]

That's a good point, thanks for raising it. I cannot amend my original post sadly, though.

Here is one more source - one of the academic studies I mentioned. https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

It is not a comprehensive argument that "brave better", just that it sends less tracking information by default. Still, I think that's an important metric.

[shubhamkrm]

I wonder how Brave compares to (Firefox + uBlock Origin + Privacy Badger).

[plaguepilled]

Privacy Badger is not recommended these days. It actually makes you more fingerprintable in some cases. Its better to use in-browser anti fingerprinting.

Brave's adblock is actually based on the filtering used by ublock (check out the filter list pages for both browsers!). However, it is inferior to ublock on Firefox (or librewolf) as there is more sophisticated CNAME uncloaking (among other things) on FF/LW.

[attentive]

Care to detail how Firefox/ublock is better than brave in CNAME uncloaking?

[plaguepilled]

Can do. Please refer to the below post on the uBlock Origin maintainers site: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

[attentive]

that is about chrome comparison which can NOT do CNAME-uncloaking.

Brave does do CNAME-uncloaking.

I thought you were saying firefox CNAME-uncloaking is somehow better than brave's.

[matheusmoreira]

Brave is inferior to Firefox with uBlock Origin. In my experience advertisers get around Brave's blocker more often.

[gunapologist99]

Or you can run those two with Brave and not use Brave's built-in shields as much.

[vorticalbox]

On desktop you can also add your own lists to braves filters and even create your own if you so wish.

[matheusmoreira]

Can't do that on mobile.