There are a few features in Brave which let you improve your browsing experience by connecting to a web service. Most of these are off by default.
To manage your Privacy and security Settings:
- Launch Brave and open the Menu:
- Navigate to Settings → Advanced → Privacy and Security
- Choose from the list of Privacy and security settings
Privacy and Security settings you can control
When typing search terms in the address bar, your default search engine may offer suggestions to help you complete your search. As you type, text is sent to your search engine so that they can show you suggestions. This is off by default.
When you visit a website, Brave needs to look up the IP address for that site’s domain name and then get the content of that web page. Pages can load a little faster if Brave does this before you actually click on a link. However, this means that Brave connects to sites even when you haven’t actually decided to visit them, and those sites might log visits or set cookies as if you had visited them. This is off by default.
Brave can alert you when you try to visit a site which might try to harm your computer through phishing, malware, or other nefarious activities. This involves downloading lists of potentially-malicious sites but it doesn’t reveal which sites you visit or any personal browsing information. Additionally, instead of connecting to Google, Brave’s version of Safe Browsing connects to a Brave-run server which doesn’t keep any logs or store your IP address. Learn more about the design of Safe Browsing. This is a really important safety feature, so it’s on by default, but you can turn it off.
Please see our detailed section on WebRTC at the bottom section of the page.
See crash reporting.
With Web Payments, you can add credit cards or other payment methods to Brave to make it easier to shop online — it’s like autofill, but even smoother on sites which support it. If you’ve added a payment method to Brave, this option allows you to decide whether to automatically show sites that you have Web Payments enabled. This is on by default, but it only takes action once you’ve added a payment method.
This is an advanced feature which provides access to very fine-grained controls over the certificates used to verify the security of your connection to sites. Very few people should ever need to use this tool.
You can remove information that you accumulate as you browse; like history and cookies. Pick which information you want to clear — everything, or only stuff from the last hour or so. If you find yourself using this often, perhaps you’d like to use Private Windows.
WebRTC IP Handling Policy
WebRTC is a web feature which lets you do things like make phone calls or video-chat in your browser. Because WebRTC connects directly to the people you’re chatting with, it can reveal your IP address to them. Brave has an advanced option which lets you change the exact details of this, but most people shouldn’t need to change this setting.
- Default: This is the default behavior in Brave when Fingerprinting Protection is off unless you are in a Tor tab. WebRTC has the right to enumerate all interfaces and bind them to discover public interfaces.
- Default Public And Private Interfaces: WebRTC should only use the default route used by http. This also exposes the associated default private address. Default route is the route chosen by the OS on a multi-homed endpoint.
- Default Public Interface Only: WebRTC should only use the default route used by http. This doesn't expose any local addresses.
- Disable Non-Proxied UDP: WebRTC should only use TCP to contact peers or servers unless the proxy server supports UDP. This doesn't expose any local addresses either. This is the default when Fingerprinting Protection is on and when you are using a Tor tab.
Still have questions?
If you would like to request further assistance, get more information or this article didn't address your issue, please reach out to us on our Brave Community website.