Brave Offers Improves Tracking Protection

Brave will soon support a new Unlinkable Bouncing feature that improves the web browser’s tracking protection functionality.

“This feature protects your privacy by noticing when you’re about to visit a privacy harming (or otherwise suspect) website, and instead routes that visit through a new, temporary browser storage,” Brave software engineer Aleksey Khoroshilov and senior software engineer Ivan Efremov write in the announcement post. “This prevents the site from identifying you by tying your footprint to that of previous visits, but allows the site to otherwise function as normal.”

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Basically, Unlinkable Bouncing makes it appear that each of your visits to a site is a unique, first-time visit, creating what Brave calls an anonymous digital profile. And because the temporary storage it creates is deleted when you browse away from the suspect site, it can never re-identify you when you visit in the future. The feature is part of a broader capability that Brave is developing called “first-party ephemeral storage,” which is similar to—-but more powerful and user-friendly than—clearing the browser storage every time you leave a site.

Today, Brave’s tracking protection also includes query parameter stripping, debouncing, and bounce-tracking interstitial features. But Unlinkable Bouncing is enabled in Brave Nightly, and it will be part of Brave’s stable release soon, in version 1.37.

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Conversation 9 comments

  • darkgrayknight

    Premium Member
    09 March, 2022 - 11:56 am

    <p>What is great about Brave is that they really do make the browser privacy focused.</p>

  • arjay

    09 March, 2022 - 2:04 pm

    <p>I hope Brave succeeds; they’re doing everything right.</p>

  • beckoningeagle

    Premium Member
    09 March, 2022 - 2:42 pm

    <p>I recently switched back to Brave from Edge. I really tried to give Edge a chance, but the constant tie ins with Shopping, Bing and a slew of things I am not interested in, that can’t be turned made me go back to brave. Even on Mobile the I was not able to remove the stupid "Shopping" button from the new tab page.</p><p><br></p>

    • Donte

      09 March, 2022 - 9:10 pm

      <p>On a computer I have turned all of that stuff off in Edge. Took just seconds to do that. </p><p><br></p><p>I have Edge on my iPhone and I have never seen any shopping stuff on that version of Edge.</p><p><br></p><p>I have tried Brave…just not for me. The more fringe you go with your browsers, the more issues you can have in my experience. Opera, Brave and Vivaldi all have had "quirks" for me, enough to make me just go back to Chrome in the past, and now Edge.</p>

    • wright_is

      Premium Member
      10 March, 2022 - 2:53 am

      <p>I only use Edge on my work PC for managing our Microsoft 365 portal. For everything else, it if Firefox, Safari and Brave.</p>

  • spacein_vader

    Premium Member
    09 March, 2022 - 2:55 pm

    <p>This sounds a lot like Mozillas facebook/Google* containers in Firefox. Making the tab sit within its own container which doesn’t see your other browsing.</p><p><br></p><p>*they’re the defaults but you can make one for any site. </p>

  • locust_infested_orchard_inc.

    09 March, 2022 - 5:50 pm

    <p>I somehow doubt this so-called "improved tracking protection" shall be be able to evade / disguise the user’s browser fingerprinting executed by JavaScript, unless the browser or a specific browser extension is deployed to rewrite / obfuscate the user’s browser fingerprint.</p><p><br></p><p>One can check to see how unique one is (browser fingerprint uniqueness) by visiting: https :// amiunique [dot] org/fp</p>

    • bennett_cg

      09 March, 2022 - 6:24 pm

      <p>Brave generates randomized fingerprints to evade trackers, rather than trying to block them. The result is the same, though, the unwanted trackers get a false and ephemeral trail. </p><p>EFF’s Cover Your Tracks tool provides a good demonstration of this approach at work. </p>

  • furdturgeson

    Premium Member
    18 March, 2022 - 12:36 pm

    <p>I’ve been using Brave for 2 years… that makes me smarter than everyone reading this. *insert your emoji here* It just works for me, strips things out what I don’t want to see… and they seem to actually care about privacy. Or they are really good at making me think they do. It doesn’t seem to have all the weirdness that non-standard browsers used to have… it works with extensions as I need them… since it moved to the codebase or whatever of chrome it’s nearly perfect for what I need. Its only real problem is windows not letting me make it a true default… and that isn’t a Brave problem. </p>

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