I’m curious as to whether brave profiles completely separated from one another (for privacy reasons), or are they still sharing some data between them? would creating new profile be enough or installing a new instance of Brave is recommended in this case? Thanks!
@deny5639 profiles share everything in brave://flags and custom content filters at brave://settings/shields/filters. As far as I know, everything else is isolated.
Btw, in terms of privacy, this would be two separate profiles for yourself, right? Or at least in a situation where you’re not concerned about being able to see information in either profile but just are wanting to make sure the data from one profile doesn’t “touch” the other?
Initially plan to create one for a family member, but I guess I’ll just create a separate windows account. However, is there any way you can password-protect each profile?
and in terms of privacy from tracking/fingerprinting, would the sharing between profiles of brave://flags and brave://settings/shields/filters make them flagged as the same person/ being linked?
Thanks for your reply.
No. This is part of why I was asking. The other part to consider is if you saved passwords to your browser then that encryption and all happens using your OS login. So if your family member knew the password for the device then when they were using it they could just choose your profile and then view any of your passwords since they’d know the OS account password.
So yeah, if wanted a barrier between the people using it, you would certainly want to make sure to have separate accounts. But if didn’t care about that and just was keeping all else separate, would be good.
Tracking would be separate. All cookies and all would be isolated to the individual profiles.
Fingerprinting essentially separate as well, though I don’t know to which level you want to get. If I’m being overly picky, keep in mind it will be the same browser version, same OS, likely same IP address (if you’re not using VPN), etc. Brave does have fingerprint randomization which would help change things up, otherwise the “fingerprint” would essentially be the same even between profiles.
To build on this and make sure you understand those two I listed:
brave://flags is just enabling or disabling features of the browser. The average person doesn’t mess with them but if either of you did, then it would impact the other. To be clear, this is different than the normal Settings.
Custom content filters at brave://settings/shields/filters would also persist across. This isn’t your normal adblocker stuff but would be any custom rules. So like let’s say you went to some shopping website and you used Block Elements to remove a banner you saw there. This would create a special rule in the custom rules section.
Then if your family member used their profile on the same OS user account, then they visited that same website, the banner wouldn’t be there because you made that rule. Or if they went into the Settings to the content filter thing, they would have that special rule you created. If they removed it, then it would remove it from yours as well.
This happens even if not synced. I’m hoping it eventually gets isolated, but as of now it’s the same.
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Thanks for this explanation. Yes, I hope in the future it could be isolated.
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