Best Browser Privacy? Edge vs Chrome vs Firefox vs Brave in Wireshark

so which is the most private and safe browser is it Edge is it Chrome is it Firefox or is it Brave in order to look into that look under the hood I actually have War shark running on the system monitoring every single connection that's being made and this is going to show us exactly what is happening when we use these browsers so let's start up Edge and let's see what happens well immediately we're connected to scorecard research.com and if we look that up scorecard research a service of Full Circle studies is part of comscore a leading Global Market Research effort that studies and reports internet Trends and behavior not much needs to be said there if you open up Microsoft Edge you are automatically consenting to participating in a study by not even Microsoft by a third party company that's going to collect your data to study internet Trends and Behavior now other than that we're also obviously connecting to amazon.com and this I believe is Amazon going through Akamai which is a CDN and then obviously bing.com msn.com a lot more of Bing google.com Bing apis events.data.microsoft.com lot more of scorecard research because after all Edge is built on top of chrome we've got g dot doubleclick.net these are trackers and some js queries via cloudflare but hey that's Microsoft Edge is there business model so no surprises there let's see what happens when we open Google Chrome immediately the same stuff Google apis Client Services dot Google apis counts.google.com update dot Google apis optimization guide interestingly they don't name anything Telemetry but of course these are just the requests made we don't know what's going on behind the scenes and the kind of data that's being sent I mean seeing some connections here is not entirely a surprise it is a web browser after all it is supposed to connect to the internet and the fact that Google and Microsoft are collecting your data is probably not news to you so let's look at some of the more private browsers or should I say historically private browsers the most popular one is probably Firefox now if we open that up let's see what we get so it's a very long list here so I'm going to try to scroll up to the top of it if I can oh dear so to start off we have cdn.mezilla.net content signature Amazon trust which I believe is uh the sponsored link by Mozilla bunch of requests to that probably just to load the content on screen then we've got services.mezilla.com Firefox settings getpocket.cdn.mezilla.net so that is for the recommended stories that you see here which again reminds me a lot of Edge and look what we have here we've got incoming Telemetry dot mozilla.org more Telemetry more images digisert for our certificates push dot services.mezilla.com that's just I guess the websites that are listed here and maybe some of the stories that are being loaded more dot Co dot UK going through some CDN you get the point um if you thought opening up Firefox would have been a clean slate or you'll be disappointed now I know many of you will point out that you can obviously go into settings and you can turn off shortcuts you can turn off recommended by pocket you can turn off recent activity and then you've got a cleaner browser and we can probably get rid of a lot of these requests that way and it's only going to be the Telemetry the services and a few other queries being made and arguably it's a little bit easier to do that with Firefox than it is to do it with Google or Microsoft but what concerns me is that every browser is moving in this direction which suggests it is driven by user Behavior now I don't personally like the sponsored stories or the news that edge tries to feed me I always disable that stuff but the fact that Firefox by default comes like that as well and I have to disable it the same way I have to disable it in Edge shows that there's a bigger Trend here now let's look at Brave a browser that advertises itself for privacy features and if we scroll down to the bottom here let's see what we've got so we've got component updater.brave.com extguard.io Google domains.com by the way both Brave and Firefox use Google safe browsing services so we're going to see some requests related to that we've also got interestingly some microsoft.com related queries but I'm not sure if this is happening from the system or from the browser variations stop brave.com these are the main queries it looks a little bit cleaner there's nothing explicitly stating something like Telemetry but again if we have a look at Brave on one hand you've got trackers and AD blocked and of course it does come with a built-in ad blocker but at the same time you've got Brave rewards and if you scroll down turn on Brave news and never miss a story so again going in same direction Brave news is out supported with private anonymized ads and it makes you wonder for how long at the end of day this is their business model as well and if you go to their official site and you see how they Market themselves so they say it's the best privacy online and don't get me wrong this is all good stuff but then if we look at their own menu one of the things you see is private advertising help shape the attention economy of tomorrow so they're going to do advertising they're only going to make it Anonymous and the issue with that obviously is that anonymized ads don't work as well which is why the big companies came up with targeted ads and it would be amazing if this program was a success but what I'm guessing is going to happen as this gets more traction if it does is that they're going to have to start to introduce maybe a little bit of tracking and a little bit more tracking eventually they're going to move in the same direction as well but I guess with brave you could say that because they rely on the fact that they're private to get users to use them unlike Microsoft and Google who get users to use them because that's the default browser on their computer they will be forced to keep the platform private and I sincerely hope that's the case but one of things worth noticing is that regardless of which browser we use you can see all of the queries we're making Within wiresharks so anybody who is looking at this on the network would be able to see this your ISP would be able to see this so let's say I open up Brave I navigate to multigim.ac.uk you will see a request pop-up over here there you go https nottingham.ac.uk now as long as you're using https the traffic that's being transmitted is going to be encrypted but everyone can still see every single site that you're posting use it for marketing purposes whatever and that is why we're going to talk about another browser which is tor now let's see what happens when I start the tour browser we're up and loaded let's see what requests were made oh wait there's no request and if I go to a site over here again nothing shows up and that is because Tor is a fundamentally different architecture think of it as a decentralized VPN browser so instead of a VPN where you've got a centralized entity that's providing the the servers that's routing encrypting your traffic making it Anonymous you've got random users all over the world who are doing that for you now the benefit to that obviously is well you're not trusting a central entity but the downside is well all of that data has to eventually come out somewhere and that's what they call an exit node and if you're a tour exit node and somebody's doing some kind of illegal activity and that data goes through you and that is what makes this a very tricky conversation now if you want real privacy what you would do is you would probably use Tor and then on top of that you would use some kind of third-party VPN so just as example I can go into my secure VPN just turn that on and now all of my traffic is going through their servers now of course every single browser is going to have a private window which is going to minimize the amount of tracking as well and of course they will all have their own privacy policies now even firefox's privacy policy is not that great frankly they say at Mozilla we believe that private is fundamental to a healthy internet but then when you actually read they have sections saying in order to recommend relevant content they use location data Firefox uses your IP address Technical and interaction data Firefox Census Data such as the position size and placement of content we suggest as well as the basic data about your interactions with the content so if I click on one of their sponsored stories they're tracking that so they can suggest the kind of stories I'm more likely to click on well that's exactly the kind of AD tracking that Google and everybody else does it may not be as extensive but it's kind of the same thing and they are sharing it with a third party which is pocket Mozilla and pocket receive aggregated data about the recommendations you see in Click we also share aggregated data about the sponsored content you see and click with our third-party ad platform Kevo so advertisers can see how many people click on their articles so maybe it's anonymized to some extent May maybe it's a little bit better than Edge and chrome but no I don't even want to look at Chrome or Edge privacy policy because let's be honest with those the choice is simple do you want Microsoft's version of Skynet or do you want Google's version of Skynet imagine what all the cool names people came up with and then in the end we have chat GPT let me know your thoughts in the comments Below in terms of what you think is the best browser to use and how you set up your internet usage now there are other things you can obviously do like using different DNS service that's going to encrypt your DNS that's a great way to improve your privacy as well but at the end of day if you look at any browser popularity statistic this is what it looks like you've got Chrome Safari and Edge and maybe Safari is probably the most private of the three but this is what most users are going to use even Firefox is way down do you just use the browser that's most convenient to you the features you like the most or do you actually look into the privacy and also let me know if you care about stories because I personally hate news stories being fed in my browser window but since everybody's doing it I guess somebody must like them like and share this video If you enjoyed it subscribe let me know if you'd like see more content like this now to our sponsor if you're a fan of Open Source content You're Gonna Love This crowdsec Is An Open Source intrusion prevention system that you can deploy on any platform Windows Linux whatever to block Hackers from trying to infiltrate your network now if you don't know how to set this up crowdsack recently set up the crowdsec academy which gives you the option to sign up and join one of their courses to learn how to set up an effective intrusion protection system I've already set it up on 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Channel: The PC Security Channel

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Keywords: The PC Security Channel, TPSC, cybersecurity, cyber security, computer security, internet security, antivirus, ransomware, virus, best antivirus, best internet security, learn cybersecurity, hacking, hack, security, technology, cyber insurance, cybersecurity degree, best EDR, EDR, most private browser, which is the safest browser, browser privacy test, edge vs chrome vs firefox, edge, firefox, chrome, brave, brave vs firefox, privacy test, best browser for privacy, best browser

Id: _JNg4Ox2Hvc

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023