The Douglas J Leith team from the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, recently conducted a study that tested six web browsers to determine the frequency of their phone homes and the data they shared. The six browsers are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge, and Yandex Browser.
Leith conducted this research “to assess the privacy risks associated with back-end data exchange”, in other words, to determine the intrusiveness of telemetry. The team conducted a series of tests to see which browsers saw exactly what data was shared in five different scenarios. The five scenarios are: the browser is launched for the first time after a fresh installation, the browser is closed and restarted, the URL is pasted into the navigation bar, the URL is typed in the address bar, and the browser is not used.
The research results show that from a privacy perspective, these browsers can be divided into three groups according to their pros and cons. Brave is the first (most private) echelon; Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are tied for second; Edge is third with Yandex (the most private).
The report states that “From a privacy standpoint, Microsoft Edge and Yandex are more worrying than the other four browsers. Both send identifiers that link to the device hardware and are therefore retained in newly installed browsers, and It can also be used to link different applications running on the same device. Edge sends the device’s hardware UUID to Microsoft, which is a powerful and persistent identifier that cannot be easily changed or deleted. ”
Since the first start, Edge has been found to perform phone home operations. At the same time, the browser also recorded each URL typed in the address bar and shared it with Microsoft’s SmartScreen website (nav.smartscreen.microsoft.com) and Bing.
The report concludes, “From a privacy standpoint, Microsoft Edge and Yandex are qualitatively different from other browsers studied. Both send persistent identifiers, which are then used to use the request (and the associated IP address / Location) to the backend server. Edge also sends the device ’s hardware UUID to Microsoft, and Yandex also sends the hashed hardware identifier to the back-end server. To our knowledge, this behavior cannot be disabled by the user. Except for sharing In addition to search auto-completion, which shares details of visited webpages, both transfer webpage information to servers not related to search auto-completion. “