Podcast
Root Causes 255: What Is a Privacy Browser?


Hosted by
Tim Callan
Chief Compliance Officer
Jason Soroko
Fellow
Original broadcast date
November 11, 2022
In this episode we describe privacy browsers, which quite simply are browsers designed to pay special attention to the user's privacy, including some of the strategies they use to protect privacy and the pros and cons of this approach.
Podcast Transcript
Lightly edited for flow and brevity.
Let’s talk about the big ones. Way, way back in the day, Tim, I remember using Links as a browser, which didn’t even have graphics. It was just something that most of you who would look at would have thought it was back in ancient times. But then, of course, we had Netscape, which then evolved into other major software vendors who created things like Google came up with Chrome. We had Microsoft coming out with Internet Explorer, which is now Edge, which is based off of Chromium and then we have, of course, Apple’s Safari which is used on their iOS devices and their Mac OS, etc., etc. Then, all of the sudden, in more recent times, Tim, you’ve probably heard of some other browsers and I’m thinking about people who were concerned with the usage of cookies, people who were concerned with the amount of tracking going on and advertisements that were targeted at you based on your browser information, etc., etc. There’s so many reasons; there’s a lot more than just one why people might use a privacy browser. Let’s name a few of them. DuckDuckGo has a privacy browser, works on mobile devices and I think there was an announcement right around middle of October about DuckDuckGo being created on desktops for Mac OS.
And there are other desktop browsers which will also obviously work on mobile devices. Brave Browser is another privacy browser and there are, of course, the traditional browsers, FireFox, Chrome, Edge, etc., which all have things like incognito modes and privacy modes. So, each one of them will claim to do some kind of enhanced privacy but some of these privacy browsers are very, very specific in what they do and what I find interesting, Tim, and I’ll end the thought here for a moment, I find it so fascinating that the underlying code base for some of these privacy browsers are directly sourced from open-source projects that we know and love from the traditional big browsers. So, for example, this latest DuckDuckGo that was announced for Mac OS is using WebKit. In other words, it is built off of the same bones as Safari and something like I’m thinking of Brave which I believe, if I’m not mistaken is based off of Chromium, the bones of Chrome.
So, Tim, if this podcast is really about privacy browsers, what would you like to see in a privacy browser? Like if you go into a privacy mode the funny thing is, it’s more than one thing isn’t it? We are thinking about ad blocking. We are thinking about header tracking.
So, I think that there’s a lot of interesting feature sets in some of these alternative browsers even to the point of alright, cookie management. So, if you take any of the major browsers, they’ve always kind of allowed you to clear cookies and handle have a lot of customization in terms of how you want to handle these kinds of tracking mechanisms but some of these privacy browsers actually have full-blown cookie management systems that really do a good job and are focused on doing that specifically. And that’s part of what a privacy browser is giving you.
I think, Tim, for those of you who haven’t seen how web traffic actually works, it used to be very common back in the day. In fact, still is. In order to be able to very specifically target you as a person browsing the web, the more bits of information about you that are unique will basically enable a marketer to basically track you and all of your traffic across the internet.
There’s some other features as well, Tim, and some of these are kind of random. It’s almost like quasi VPN tools. There’s like another layer of encryption sometimes going on. Quite often, there are some very specific tracking mechanisms that are used by people who are obviously trying to market to you, trying to do – as you say – trying to identify uniquely. There are unique browser features that sometimes the bad guys are bad guys and sometimes you need just marketers that are trying to uniquely identify you. In other words, some of these privacy browsers have these features more uniformly set and there’s a lot more education to the user about, hey, if you set this feature in the configuration on or off, you will make yourself more trackable and therefore, we are defaulting to be a less trackable browser. We could get into huge amounts of data points here, Tim, in terms of configuration changes where the person tracking you is simply looking to see whether or not those features are turned on or off and those on or off binary pieces of information help to uniquely track you.
I think that there is a push by the developer community because they are fully aware of all of this and they are probably not anxious to utilize rich feature sets that will stop people from being able to render cleanly within some of these privacy browsers. So, at the moment, I’m not hearing a lot of backlash from users saying, hey, I’m not getting full rich experience here. I think the risk is there to do that. I think that when early web technology rich browsing technology, those feature sets were out there and people were experimenting by using a lot of different things and finding that not every browser was handling it the same or cleanly. I think that there then became a push to simplify and offer richness in a way that was handled by more generic rendering. And so, therefore, I think that’s less of a risk now.
I think in practice what the privacy browsers are doing in your rendering differently than each other is going to be how they handle advertisements because a lot of websites offer advertisements on their website. Some of the privacy browsers, depending on how you have them set, are going to render those out and then how they fill white space is part of the uniqueness of the privacy browser and that’s where some of the differences come in and sometimes the competitive advantage of some of these browsers is just how cleanly they handle dealing with how do you fill in the white space left by taking away entire chunks of a website property that have to do with ads. I think in 2022, Tim, late 2022, I think that’s the world we are living in right now.
Being able to tell whether somebody is a child or not can be used for really malicious purposes and so, I certainly am not sitting here with all of the reasonings for why enhanced privacy is important; however, I do know that marketers who are legitimate absolutely have their side of the story, which is, hey, we are trying to just give you a better targeted ad experience. This doesn’t really hurt you. And then on the other hand, there are people who are really experts in privacy who can give you the hundred different ways that privacy absolutely has to be enforced in our lives because there are vulnerable people and vulnerable groups and ways that you’ve never even imagined that bad things could happen to you. So, there’s both sides of the story. I don’t claim to be an expert in that area.
I will you though, Tim, I’m gonna add just one more thought before we come to the conclusion but some of you who are listening to this might also say, hey, if you are talking about privacy browsers why in the world wouldn’t you talk about the Tor browser and all the technologies underneath Tor and, of course, that is a whole entire different level of privacy for other purposes.

