6 privacy boosting browsers
Group test
6 privacy boosting browsers
Privacy-conscious alternatives to Safari
Image credits: ArtemisDiana/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images
Group test
Reviewed by IAN OSBORNE
ON TEST…
> Brave
> DuckDuckGo
> Epic Privacy Browser
> Firefox
> Opera
> Vivaldi
While you’re browsing the web, do you know who’s browsing you? Is your web browser spying, gathering information about your viewing habits and feeding it back to people who want to sell you something? And is this a problem for you anyway? If it is, and you’d prefer to keep your web browsing habits private, you need a privacy-focused browser like the ones on test here. Instead of treating your data as a product to sell, they keep your digital footprint as small as possible.
But why would you want to prevent such tracking measures? Surely targeted ads aren’t a huge issue? The huge amount of personal information collected by web browsers is, like a lot of online information, vulnerable to being exposed if the company collecting it suffers a data breach. Malicious extensions can also syphon off such data, sending it to places you really didn’t want it to go. And targeted ads might not be as benign as you think. According to Peter Dolanjski, executive director of product at DuckDuckGo, “Algorithms can use this data to exploit you. It could be coercing you to buy something, it could be political campaigns, it could be price discrimination.”
Here we test six of the most popular privacy-focused web browsers, which are designed to prevent tracking and keep your details out of corporate databases. The screenshots were taken using the browsers’ default settings, but obviously these can be configured.