On the 1st of January 2023, Brave browser went on Twitter to share its highlights and stats for the previous year. Over 284k privacy-infringing trackers have been blocked in the year 2022.
Another year of private browsing is over! 🎉
What are your Brave Stats now? pic.twitter.com/GrVB9yT7sA
— Brave Software (@brave) January 1, 2023
Brave browser is a privacy-centric Web browser with built-in Web3 capabilities like a crypto wallet and BAT tokens. As of 2022, Brave recorded over 57 million users because, unlike other browsers, it is focused on developing Privacy enhancing tools that don’t record users’ private browser activities either on their local devices or on a centralized database. Thus giving users control over their personal data.
Most users do not fully understand the concept of privacy on the internet, and more still don’t use the private browsing features on their devices. With such browsers as google, it became public knowledge that browsing incognito has little to no privacy protection as advertised since the centralized companies still store their users’ data through cookies and temp files, which they sell to the highest bidder.
By contrast, Brave is an internet browser project that aims to achieve true privacy on the web by blocking all third-party ads & trackers by default. Added to that, Brave upgrades your Internet security to HTTPS whenever possible. Brave hides its users’ browsing behavior from Big Tech companies, allowing them to stay anonymous whether in regular mode or incognito.
Brave then implemented a new system, STAR, which protects its users’ privacy by ensuring the data they contribute is never unique to any user. This feature, sometimes called k-anonymity, limits the identifier’s lifetime and ensures that the entity attempting to collect user data can only see a submitted value if other users have also submitted the same value.
Brave also went a step further and strengthened its fingerprinting protection. this prevents users from being identified based on such things as their preferred browser language. To achieve this, Brave randomizes how each device informs websites of what language is set as default and what fonts have been installed on the device.
With the above features, the brave browser was able to block over 284k trackers this year alone, and they promised even more features and upgrades to handle intrusive privacy sites better, pushing back against privacy infringement in the web2 space.
The brave browser then asked its users to share their statistics of trackers and ads blocked and the amount of bandwidth saved for 2022.
