January 21, 2024 at 03:15PM
Brave Software plans to discontinue the ‘Strict’ fingerprinting protection mode in its privacy-focused Brave Browser due to its negative impact on website functionality. The mode, designed to enhance user privacy, causes issues for roughly 0.5% of users, making them more susceptible to tracking. The change aims to prioritize efficiency and user experience.
After reviewing the meeting notes, here are the key takeaways:
1. Brave Software is planning to deprecate the ‘Strict’ fingerprinting protection mode in its privacy-focused Brave Browser due to issues causing many sites to function incorrectly.
2. Fingerprinting protection in Brave Browser is intended to enhance user privacy by preventing websites from tracking users through a technique called fingerprinting, a tracking method that collects various device and browser data to derive a unique and persistent identifying profile.
3. Brave currently offers two protection modes, ‘Standard’ and ‘Strict,’ that implement different levels of blocking against known fingerprinting methods.
4. The decision to deprecate the ‘Strict’ mode was spurred by the realization that it is causing more trouble than it is worth for both the project and its users. Usage statistics revealed that only 0.5% of users utilize the ‘Strict’ mode, and its aggressive blocking often results in websites not functioning correctly, leading to a degraded browsing experience for those users.
5. The ‘Standard’ fingerprinting protection will continue to exist, enhanced and optimized for solid protection against tracking, while the removal of ‘Strict’ fingerprinting protection has already taken place on the testing ‘Nightly’ release and will be rolled out to the stable branch with version 1.64 for the desktop and Android.
6. With an estimated 65.5 million active monthly users, the change is expected to directly impact over 330,000 users based on the 0.5% usage statistic shared by the Brave team.
Overall, the Brave team believes that dedicating resources to maintain ‘Strict’ mode for a relatively small user base is not the most efficient use of the project’s limited resources and is committed to strengthening and expanding ‘Standard’ fingerprinting protections to ensure all users have ever-improving protection against fingerprinting, while maintaining compatibility with websites.