Brave Software has announced its decision to phase out the ‘Strict’ fingerprinting protection mode in its privacy-centric Brave Browser due to operational issues on many websites. Fingerprinting protection is a feature designed to bolster user privacy by preventing websites from tracking users through a technique known as fingerprinting. This method involves collecting various device and browser data to create a unique and persistent identifying profile without relying on cookies. Brave offers two protection modes, namely ‘Standard’ and ‘Strict,’ implementing different levels of blocking against known fingerprinting methods. However, the team observed that the aggressive blocking in ‘Strict’ mode often leads to websites not functioning correctly, impacting user experience.
The ‘Strict’ mode, used by approximately 0.5% of Brave’s users, poses challenges, with aggressive blocking causing degraded website functionality for this subset of users. Despite the more aggressive blocker, these users become more discernible and vulnerable to fingerprinting due to their distinct behavior. Recognizing that maintaining ‘Strict’ mode for a relatively small user base is not the most efficient use of resources, Brave has opted to deprecate it. Instead, the focus will remain on enhancing and optimizing the ‘Standard’ fingerprinting protection, which already provides robust safeguards against tracking while maintaining high compatibility with websites.
Brave’s decision is driven by the belief that dedicating resources to ‘Strict’ mode, given its limited user adoption, is not the most effective use of the project’s resources. The ‘Standard’ fingerprinting protection will continue to exist and be strengthened to ensure all users receive ever-improving protection against fingerprinting, with the removal of ‘Strict’ mode. The change has already been implemented in the testing ‘Nightly’ release and is scheduled to be rolled out to the stable branch with version 1.64 for desktop and Android users in the coming months. With only 0.5% of users utilizing ‘Strict’ mode, this change directly affects a relatively small subset of over 330,000 users based on Brave’s reported 65.5 million active monthly users.
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