Web browsers are the most common portal for users to access the internet for any purpose. People use web browsers for authenticating payments, access social media, and whatnot.
To make it easy for them, people often save their credentials on the browser itself, like payment details, passwords, etc. This means that browsers must ensure that all user data is kept safe and private and no breaches happen.
Various researchers have tried to document which browsers offer the safest user experiences. These researches have focused on a browser’s ability to send advertising data, or track users on various websites, something that can be turned of by sending a “Do not track” request on Google Chrome.
New research conducted by Douglas J. Leith from the School of Computer Science & Statistics, Trinity College, Dublin focuses on a web browser’s connections to the backend servers and what kind of data it sends back home.
Microsoft Edge: Least Private Web Browser
The new research studied six web browsers, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Brave Browser and Yandex Browser. It shows that Microsoft Edge is one of the least private web browsers as it sends identifiers that are linked to the device hardware to backend servers.
The research divided the six browsers into three groups:
- First group (most private) - Brave
- Second group - Chrome, Firefox, Safari
- Third group (least private) - Edge, Yandex
Along with Microsoft Edge, Yandex also sends identifiers linked to device hardware to backend servers.
The research says, “Edge sends the hardware UUID (Universal Unique Identifier) of the device to Microsoft, a strong and enduring identifier that cannot be easily changed or deleted.”
Yandex also exhibits similar behaviour as it sends a hash of the hardware serial number and MAC address to backend servers. Unfortunately, users cannot manually disable this setting in either Yandex or Edge.
This kind of behaviour raises some serious privacy concerns, especially for Microsoft Edge users.
Edge also has a search autocomplete feature and Microsoft says that it collects search history to give users better search results in the future. When users search on Edge, it sends a request to the backend server in real-time. These requests contain details about web pages visited, including URLs. Users can, however, turn this feature off manually in the browser settings.
Brave Emerges as Most Private Browser
On the flip side, the research also found that Brave was one of the most private web browsers. Brave disables the search autocomplete feature and sends no requests to the backend while the user is typing their search query.
It is important to note that Brave is the only browser out of the six tested which does not have the search autocomplete feature enabled by default.
Brave does not make use of any identifiers which allow tracking by backend servers, as opposed to Edge or Yandex.
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