Brave NUKES Privacy Feature! Should You Panic?

Brave Browser is sunsetting its strict fingerprint protection. Here's their reasoning, the pros/cons, the alternatives for those needing strong fingerprint protection, my thoughts, and more!

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00:00 Hello!
00:16 The removed feature and what it is
01:38 Brave's Reasoning
03:46 Community Perspectives/Takes
05:30 My personal takes
07:50 What it means for you!
#brave #bravebrowser #techlore

[AnomalyTea]

Disappointing. The kind of people who will manually enable and are willing to work with strict anti-fingerprinting are also the kind who will manually disable telemetry. I'd wager good money that the 0.5% figure is not accurate.

[JAM_]

I personally use strict mode and have seen almost no websites that are broken only only on strict mode, most of the broken websites require you to disable block fingerprinting altogether. I think the reason most people don't use strict mode is because the warning that it may break websites scares off a lot of people who wouldn't have any problems otherwise using it, I think if they reworded the warning it may gain much higher usage. I do agree as well, that most of the users with strict mode enabled probably have telemetry disabled.

[thatscrazy]

The only reason I was using Brave was because of that function !!! And of course I disable telemetry on all software ! I now have to announce literally 4000 people to uninstall Brave because I advertised it for the fingerprint protection. What a stupid decision they made. Of course all the people that use fingerprint protection disable telemetry also.

[LautaroQ]

Isn't Brave Open Source? Just announce the halt on development and let the community develop strict mode or at least maintain it, if they wanted to. Just to not remove a feature and not take away the option from people.

[William]

If you turn this on you turn telemetry off. I guess nobody taught them about how selection bias works

[forderdrek]

Probably could've just left it in as an experimental feature withouth any further updates. Not that big of a deal though

[neroai]

Seems like they kinda lost focus removing features and not working on real need ones for users

[F_Around_and_find_out]

hmm, like the OpenBSD approach: The code stays because it still serve a purpose. But when it isn't or nobody around to maintain it, code is discarded. That's efficiency tbh.

[majorfallacy]

I have had almost 0 websites break using strict mode within the last few years

[danmar]

To anyone who thinks that the loss of internet privacy happened yesterday, Tim Minchin wrote a song about it for the show Big Fat Quiz of 2009. I think the problem with privacy and security is that the people who code the solutions are the same who code the problems!!

[YT.Armorchampion]

Bummer, it touched just enough into hard core stuff like fingerprint blocking that it was a no brainer. I guess I can move up the ranks to Tor for some situations. I won't uninstall brave but I might use it less in the future.

[SirWolf]

Why noone seems to think of just adding the ability to add exceptions (excluding certain sites from fingerprinting protection)?

[Deadmeme]

I'm starting to come around on telemetry and diagnostics ONLY IF it is anonymized and from a trustworthy source. I really like Fedora so I left diagnostics on to help the project even it it's only a tiny bit. On windows? Hell no.

[ichigo-opfn]

Needed the answer for a question. Dear friend,
I was using brave and mistakenly opened the brave with tor private window. And in the top left window it started connecting me and when it reached 60% I panicked and closed the window. After I read about nodes things like entry nodes who knows your Ip address, I wanted to ask if it is safe ? Or my ip is compromised and prone to hackers?

Please answer my friend

[www]

i use strict mode, telemetry off, never had any sites

[ConfusingZark-hjbt]

SO more people need to just use the feature

[zuzoscorner]

Ten month later, uh haven't noticed anything. still no ads showing up or anything. so....uh what?

[willy.c]

In the Nightly version of Brave, it is already implemented and the truth is horrible.

I did a fingerprint test and now Firefox has better performance.

[echo]

No more Chromium browsers for me. What really pains me is seeing this affect mobile too.

[gatorrade]

I have set it to strict and no problems at all and I have analytics disabled.