I'll go into that in due course, but things get a bit negative for a while here, and I don't want anyone to think I'm dismissing the product.īundled in with Brave you have a Rewards programme, the basic concept of which is that you earn tokens for looking at ads, and then use the tokens to pay the people whose sites you saw the ads on. Imagine Chrome with those extensions, and without the Google sync, and you have a basic idea of what Brave is, out of the box.īefore I go any further I want to be clear in saying that I like the Brave browser per se and I think it has a lot to offer. Roughly speaking it's like adding an ad blocker and something like Ghostery to Chromium. But it's not going to try to sign your browsing history into a Google account, and that's an immediate head start over Chrome.īrave then augments this slightly Google-distanced version of Chrome with a Shield system, designed to block ads, and the trackers who serve them. By default, Brave is absolutely NOT free from Google data-harvesting tricks. Chromium is the open source template for Google Chrome.īrave does, however, go further than other Chromium-based browsers to distance itself from the Google relationship. How does Brave compare with its contemporaries, privacy wise? Is it the saviour of online privacy, or is it just some same old, same old hack-up hiding behind a pile of empty spin?Īt the most basic level, there's little difference between Brave and its original code source, Chromium. This year, however, I did finally try out Brave, and I'm going to document what I found. The story of Brave is one of the few, but it's a browser I found very hard to take seriously, prior to trying it. There are precious few stories of all-round browsers heading back in the other direction to restore good privacy. And as for Chrome's trick of sneakily signing the actual browser into your Google account. Telemetry and user-profiling are engaged even on the privacy-advocate's one-time fave Firefox.

Omniboxes or Omnibars routinely send data to search providers. Internet browsers are now firmly on that bandwagon.

Brave Browser has its own Tor window, which facilitates true private browsing in 'incognito' mode.ĭata is, so they say, the new oil, and the desperation for it across the web has turned once optional data-harvesting processes into regimes of force.

Brave browser sync google account