Brave to sunset strict fingerprinting protection mode as it breaks too many websites

Brave has recently announced that it will be discontinuing the strict fingerprinting protection mode with the release of desktop and Android version 1.64 in the upcoming months. The company claims that this decision will enable them to “focus on improving privacy protections in Standard mode and avoid Web compatibility issues”.

At present, Brave provides two degrees of fingerprinting protections: Standard and Strict mode. However, the company is planning to sunset the strict protection mode due to several reasons. Firstly, the strict mode often leads to malfunctioning of certain websites or in some cases, they don't function at all.

Moreover, less than 0.5% of Brave users utilize the strict fingerprinting protection mode, which ironically makes them more susceptible to fingerprinting as their usage of the strict mode makes them stand out. Lastly, maintaining and debugging the strict mode to determine why some websites don't work on Brave diverts engineers' time from improving default privacy protections that can benefit a wider range of users.

Brave has concluded that discontinuing the strict mode will actually be advantageous for users' privacy, based on these observations, and that “Brave’s Standard fingerprinting protection is already very extensive and the strongest of any major browser”.