Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Brave to end 'Strict' fingerprinting protection as it breaks websites (www.bleepingcomputer.com)

submitted 5 months ago by KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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[–] Byter@lemmy.one 14 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] RandoCalrandian@kbin.social 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] averyminya@beehaw.org 5 points 5 months ago

So rather than fixing the issue they just removed it entirely.

That's kind of a joke from a "privacy" based browser.

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago

Both points are a bit BS.

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.