Brave Software has announced plans to deprecate the 'Strict' fingerprinting protection mode in its privacy-focused Brave Browser because it causes many sites to function incorrectly.
I’d ask why they don’t make it optional (I’m not a Brave user) but it seems it was.
Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave’s users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.
This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.
Given that, I’m inclined to agree with the decision to remove it. Pick your battles and live to fight another day.
Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave’s users
Based exclusively on whether a user had not gone through the Brave’s browser settings and disabled the “Send statistics about my behavior to the Brave corporate HQ” flag.
In other words, the number is useless.
This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.
This argument could be used to tell people to avoid using the Brave browser too. After all, only a minority of people do. The best way to blend in would be to use Google Chrome on Windows 11, and improve no privacy settings.
Unless someone wants to argue that using Brave makes you an acceptable degree of unique, but using advanced tracking blocking makes you unacceptably unique.
I’d ask why they don’t make it optional (I’m not a Brave user) but it seems it was.
Given that, I’m inclined to agree with the decision to remove it. Pick your battles and live to fight another day.
Unless there’s a strong correlation between those who set fingerprint protection to strict and those that disable telemetry
In that case they’re about to piss off a much larger portion of their users than they realize
but if they have all that disabled, they probably have their ads disabled too, which means they are not making Brave any money. So they don’t care.
So rather than fixing the issue they just removed it entirely.
That’s kind of a joke from a “privacy” based browser.
Both points are a bit BS.
Based exclusively on whether a user had not gone through the Brave’s browser settings and disabled the “Send statistics about my behavior to the Brave corporate HQ” flag.
In other words, the number is useless.
This argument could be used to tell people to avoid using the Brave browser too. After all, only a minority of people do. The best way to blend in would be to use Google Chrome on Windows 11, and improve no privacy settings.
Unless someone wants to argue that using Brave makes you an acceptable degree of unique, but using advanced tracking blocking makes you unacceptably unique.