I’ve been trying to get my dad to use Brave. He installed it on his phone to play around with it, but wanted to check out some others too. He installed the DuckDuckGo mobile browser, and found a nifty " app tracker protection" feature that detects when other apps on your phone are about to send data to any 3rd-party tracking companies.
He found many of his apps seemed to be doing this, and he was incredibly dismayed that the Brave app was among them. To be sure, he’s never used Twitter/X, Facebook, or Verizon on his phone.
I downloaded the DuckDuckGo app on my phone which has Brave on it, and this did not happen to me. I’m now really confused as to what’s going on here. I’m thinking it’s probably something benign, but would like to hear from anyone if they can confirm to me about what this is.
Our protection works to block tracking requests that occur over HTTPS, which includes the majority of app traffic on the Internet.
I’m awaiting confirmation, but based on how it’s been explained to me in the past there’s a catch here. The catch here is that it’s just looking at the website’s code and what it’s sending, it’s not actually tracking what Brave is doing.
In other words, Brave will block trackers but DuckDuckGo will also see the code of the site and will list it as if it blocked something. It also fails to account for things like ephermeral third-party storage that Brave uses.
That’s different from:
But then there’s another side of things, which is on communication between apps. Brave doesn’t have anything to stop this. When you install applications they all request certain levels of permissions. If you provide them permission to view other apps or information, then this will override anything as you’re telling the OS to give it access.
Another way of saying this last part is:
That said, let me tag in @shivan and @fmarier to see if either might be able to provide exact information and look into things. I know what I’ve shared above is to be taken with a grain of salt and is basically just “what I’ve heard” and “from what I understand.”
It would be nice if they can help elaborate on what’s being reported by DuckDuckGo, what Brave is protecting from, and kind of fill in the blanks on your concerns.
@Top_Hat seems like what I was told before is right, though I’m pushing for exact confirmation. Just to show reply I got from one of DuckDuckGo’s developers:
I allready seen this before. DDG do not puts Brave in their list of browsers, is it intentional or not, I do not know. But if you allow DDG to “protect” (cough…) from any other browsers, every one of them will “track” exactly same way.
Take it for what you will, but they are basically saying when active it works similarly to what Brave Firewall + VPN does, which is see and monitor trackers and all via the web traffic before it gets to the browser.
The difference though is that DDG can’t differentiate between trackers and us visiting websites with their content. So even if it has a Facebook plugin on the site, DDG will show Facebook on the list. So what they are calling trackers aren’t always trackers.
