i saw the 18-Jan-2024 article announcing the sunsetting of “aggressive” mode in the “trackers and ads blocking” setting in the coming 1.64.x version and am disappointed and discouraged about it.
i do not send brave my anonymous statistics. thanks for asking permission for it. i wonder if other users of “aggressive” mode are of a similar mindset, such that we are not counted and your 0.5% usage metric is not correct.
i rely on brave in aggressive mode, with adblock, plus VPN (not brave’s) to mostly break all the trackers and fingerprinters. I don’t pay for this level of protection, BUT I WOULD pay for it if given the option.
Fingerprintable APIs and other trickery are out there, and the big guys seem to always be one step ahead.
[aside] but I luvluv LOVED (and will never forget) the first time I used Brave in max mode and watched google struggle to fingerprint me, page loading and reloading, finally giving up and granting access, and shortly after receiving the emails that google had detected my login on a new device. Of course they patched whatever missing thing there was and the next time a couple of days later, the process didn’t repeat, and i received no new-device emails. but it was fun. [/]
i don’t have the expertise or the time to invest in playing in the cat and mouse game gone WAR that y’all are waging on my behalf. but I sure do APPRECIATE your efforts!
this includes identifying and blocking rogue APIs that hoover up my crumbs and deliver them to the collectors for matching.
in aggressive mode, when a site fails to load or breaks, i know y’all have protected me from harm, and i know that the site devs are not responsibly building their site for privacy. i know that if it’s imperative for me to access a service or site i can lower the shields and deal with the consequences.
i would NEVER raise a ticket to complain about a broken site or otherwise take the time of the engineers to investigate!
I feel like with this sunset of the aggressive feature, that y’all have given in to the “bell curve” 80/20 dev rule that has poisoned most enterprises but looks great on annual budgets. it’s either a sign of brave’s growing size and corporate maturity, or i’m missing something and the communique was not informative enough.
please clarify the transition of aggressive features to standard blocking.
please offer a premier tier – at cost – to folks who have come to rely on your teams’ BEST and most CUTTING EDGE (make them bleed!) methods and tech.
I am disappointed about this too. Users should have the option to live with the breakage, as they have in other privacy-focused browsers.
Brave should make it more clear that the aggressive blocking can cause problems. Instead of “fixing” it, Brave devs can just tell users to use standard blocking on the troubled site and explain that aggressive blocking does not work everywhere. Users will understand this if explained correctly.
This was brought up and said that even considering those missing statistics, the number is not significant enough. In addition, that they were seeing this actually having people stand out more. You can hear just a little bit of this from @shivan where he spoke in the last Community Call, which has been shared on YouTube. You can listen in below:
I didn’t have a lot of time left in the call to ask him questions or debate, such as to stress the idea that some people want to be able to have the ability to “shoot themselves in the foot” as Shivan had mentioned in the call. I get it, a lot of people want complete control and hate when companies like Brave take away the ability of people over what is enabled, disabled, etc.
If we look deep enough, you can find where @pes has responded to people to say that they aren’t worried about websites recognizing us when we return and that some of these tests aren’t really valid in terms of what is done “in the wild.” But I think what makes it difficult is that many of us make a lot of assumptions on how things work but don’t honestly have a clue.
I’d really like to suggest you check out a reply by someone who is very knowledgeable on Shields and adblocking in general. They touch a bit on the things that Aggressive fingerprinting did, which wasn’t much. (Just WebGL, automatic dark mode detection, etc)
And hopefully also no misunderstandings. In my initial reply, I responded with the assumption of what you meant. But want to clarify that it’s Fingerprinting and not Trackers and ads blocking that is being impacted. The official notice on that is below:
We’re not remove Aggressive Ads & trackers. Aggresive fingerprinting is being removed, it causes many issues, not a helpful feature if it breaks sites.
