You are not a product.
That is the thing Brave wants you to realize more than anything. If you use their browser, called Brave, it can block ads, trackers, and fingerprint methods. And it actually works really well. This browser will work on any desktop or mobile platform.
As many of us in the cybersecurity space, we are concerned with privacy. We do not like to be tracked and we certainly don’t want ads targeted to us based on searches we are doing, especially those we do for research. So for demonstrative purposes, here are some screen shots from my browser tests.
Google website on Brave browser image
Notice the above, all I did was try to access the google.com home page, on that site it tried to load two trackers (remember Google has no ads on the homepage)
With each page you can easily choose to allow more or less security dynamically from a simple drop down menu.
Here is another test I did with Amazon.com and WalMart.com. Amazon is definitely trying to gather more data.
The results will be similar across many sites. Some sites are doing benign tracking, location and country only, while others are reaching for more.
If you want even more privacy, there is an option to connect to the TOR network with a private tab that will connect you from any exit node on the internet, a great way to distort your location.
In addition to the privacy benefits, we love the speed of the browser itself. Extremely responsive and easy to use. There are also several builtin password systems to help you manage all of those secure passwords we recommend.
We never recommend the Chrome browser. While known to be secure, there are too many trackers going on there.
Safari is a decent browser and should be getting better with the newer release with advanced blocking technology. Firefox will also be releasing enhanced blocking in the coming months. Stay away from any Microsoft browser (side story, we suspect that browser is doing a shadow proxy to control or monitor content, details to come on that).
To wrap up, take a look at the browser and see what you think. It is in it’s early stages but very mature for its age.