Douglas School of Statistics and Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland J Leith team recently conducted a study , respectively, six Web browsers were tested to determine their frequency phone home and share their data. These six are the browser, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser.
The purpose of this study was to conduct Leith "Assessment and back-end data exchange risk related to privacy", in other words, it is to determine the invasive telemetry. The team conducted a series of tests to see these browser to view in five different scenarios to share what specific data. Five scenarios are: first start a new browser after installation, shut down and restart the browser, paste the URL into the navigation bar, type the URL, and the situation did not use your browser's address bar.
The results show that, from the point of view of privacy, according to the degree of the merits of these browsers can be divided into three groups. In the first tier (most private) is only a Brave; Chrome, Firefox and Safari tied for second; and the Edge and Yandex in the third tier (privacy worst).
The report notes that "from the point of view of privacy, Microsoft Edge and Yandex more worrying than the other four browsers. Both links will be sent to the device hardware identifier, will be retained in the new installation of the browser, and can also be used to link different applications running on the same device .Edge hardware UUID will be sent to Microsoft, this is a powerful and lasting identifier, which can not be easily changed or deleted. "
Since the first launch, Edge was found to perform the operation of phone home. At the same time, the browser also recorded for each URL in the address bar type, and shared with Microsoft's SmartScreen Web site (nav.smartscreen.microsoft.com) as well as Bing.
The report concludes that "from a privacy point of view, Microsoft Edge and Yandex in quality with other browsers different studies. Both send sticky identifier, then the identifier for the request (and associated IP address / position) linked to the back-end server hardware UUID device .Edge will be sent to Microsoft, while Yandex same hardware identifier of the hash is sent to the back-end server. to our knowledge, this behavior can not be disabled by the user. in addition to sharing Search the web for more information sharing visited auto-complete functions, these two functions are independent of the web page information to auto-complete the search server. "
The full report Address: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf