Brave is gaining 'Forgetful Browsing' to dramatically improve online privacy protection

Web browser Brave has long had a focus on privacy, making it the browser of choice for those with concerns about online tracking and the like. Although Brave may be regarded as one of the most private browsers available, its developers continue to work on new innovations; the latest is Forgetful Browsing.

This new feature makes it possible to always clear cookies and other storage when a site is closed, helping to eliminate the potential for tracking and bringing other benefits. Forgetful Browsing can be enabled on a site-by-site basis, or applied across the board, and it prevents sites from using trackers to identify you, bypasses article viewing limits, and ensures that you are logged out of sites when you leave them.

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Brave says that it is introducing the feature because other browsers, "get the defaults backwards: they assume you want to be identifiable by every site you visit". While there are various privacy-enhancing modes and extensions available for different browsers, Forgetful Browsing goes further in the protections it provides.

In a blog post about the feature the company explains:

Forgetful Browsing [...] allows Brave users to easily prevent unwanted first-party reidentification, in a way that's convenient and does not require constant vigilance to get right. Using Brave Shields, users can indicate that they want to be forgotten when a site is closed. When this option is set, Brave will clear first-party storage for the site a few seconds after there are no more open tabs for the site. Forgetful Browsing clears both explicitly stored values (e.g. cookies, localStorage, or indexedDB) and indirectly stored values (e.g. HTTP cache or DNS cache).

Brave points out that the feature is different from other related options and settings:

Most settings in Brave Shields are set per domain; Forgetful Browsing, meanwhile, is set per site. For example, you can configure first.site.example to use aggressive fingerprinting protections and second.site.example to use standard fingerprinting protections, but all subdomains on site.example will share the same Forgetful Browsing setting. This is necessary to align the Forgetful Browsing setting with how Brave (and most other browsers) enforce storage boundaries.

Forgetful Browsing is available in version 1.53 of the desktop edition of Brave, and in version 1.54 of the Android app. More information is available here.

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