Brave browser blocks Microsoft Recall to protect your browsing activity

The Brave Privacy Team has announced that its web browser will block Microsoft Recall from taking screenshots.

The privacy measure comes after Microsoft started the rollout of the controversial feature, having been forced to make significant changes to the way it works. While Recall is now an opt-in feature, Brave’s announcement caters for those who would like not only more privacy, but more control.

If anyone is using the Brave web browser, they clearly already have an interest in protecting their privacy. But this does not necessarily mean that they are not interesting is seeing how Recall could benefit them. By block Recall from screenshotting web activity by default, Brave is giving people the chance to try out Recall without the fear that everything they do online will be recorded, stored in the cloud, or shared with Microsoft.

While Microsoft has already said the private or incognito browsing sessions will not be recorded by Recall, Brave is helping to eliminate the need to remember to switch into private browsing mode.

The Brave Privacy Team says:

Microsoft has said that private browsing windows on browsers will not be saved as snapshots. We’ve extended that logic to apply to all Brave browser windows. We tell the operating system that every Brave tab is ‘private’, so Recall never captures it. This is yet another example of how Brave engineers are able to quickly tweak Chromium’s privacy functionality to make Brave safer for our users (inexhaustive list here).

Although Recall has received a lot of criticism, and there has been a tremendous amount of Microsoft-bashing stemming from it, Brave gives credit where it is due.

Microsoft has, to their credit, made several security and privacy-positive changes to Recall in response to concerns. Still, the feature is in preview, and Microsoft plans to roll it out more widely soon. What exactly the feature will look like when it’s fully released to all Windows 11 users is still up in the air, but the initial tone-deaf announcement does not inspire confidence. 

Given Brave’s focus on privacy-maximizing defaults and what is at stake here (your entire browsing history), we have proactively disabled Recall for all Brave tabs. We think it’s vital that your browsing activity on Brave does not accidentally end up in a persistent database, which is especially ripe for abuse in highly-privacy-sensitive cases such as intimate partner violence.

Brave's implementation of this privacy feature allows for some nuance in usage of Recall. It echoes the screenshot blocking move made by the messaging platform Signal, but Brave has taken a somewhat gentler approach to give users the ability to use Recall in other ways.

The change can be seen in version 1.81 of the web browser for Window. Over on the Brave GitHub repository, there is an interesting thread where the idea of block Recall is proposed, discussed and battled with – check it out here.