I installed Brave Origin on Linux Mint 22.3 because it is marketed as a privacy-focused browser. However,I noticed that “daily ping” is enabled by default.
Can the Brave team explain what data is sent in the daily ping, why it is enabled by default, and how this aligns with Brave’s privacy-first approach?
Origin Build type (standalone or upgraded):
Standalone (fresh install)
Operating System and Brave Version:
Linux Mint 22.3 (64-bit)
Brave 1.91.168 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Chromium: 149.0.7827.54
Additional Information:
I expected telemetry-related features to be opt-in rather than enabled by default in a privacy-focused Brave Origin browser.
Unfortunately, I did not take a screenshot before changing the setting. After noticing that daily ping was enabled, I disabled it manually.
My STR would simply be:
Fresh install of Brave Origin on Linux Mint 22.3.
Open Brave settings.
Check the Daily Ping setting.
In my case, it was enabled by default after installation…
I no longer have the original state available since I turned it off, but this should be easy to verify by performing a fresh installation of Brave Origin on Linux Mint 22.3.
I’m not seeing this option in 1.93.24. Maybe it has already been removed?
BTW: How did you end up with version 1.91.168 of Brave Origin? That is the version number for yesterday’s release of the non-Origin package. The last 1.91.x version for Brave Origin was 1.91.121, which would have been released months ago. There have been 21 newer versions since then, in the 1.92 and 1.93 series.
@tonny856 thanks for reporting. Taking a closer look and will report back shortly. Can you confirm where you downloaded Brave Origin from? Was it from https://brave.com/origin/linux/?
@yellowfinch 1.91.168 is the current Brave Origin Release version as well. Thanks for confirming that you’re not seeing these usage pings enabled in 1.93.24.
It’s the option in question that I’m not seeing. (Not quite the same thing as not seeing it enabled. ) I looked everywhere, but maybe I missed it anyway.
Or are we talking about the one labelled Automatically send diagnostic reports? (It’s the only one under Data collection.) If so, I see it, but unfortunately I don’t remember if it was disabled by default or if I disabled it.
I have been discussing this issue with others over on the Privacy Guides Forum. Particularly two forum posts which include several screenshots I captured of the “daily usage ping” toggle disappearing after restarting Brave origin.
Apologies if linking out to other forums in this way is prohibited/restricted, I was simply hoping to avoid replicating the work that went into those original posts unnecessarily.
Edit: I’ll add here that in both posts Brave Origin was installed via the instructions provided at: https://brave.com/origin/linux/
Linked post 1 followed the “Fedora Atomic Desktops” instructions and linked post 2 followed the OpenSUSE instructions including for the Nightly install.
Thanks for supplying the link to the post on the Privacy Guides Forum. In it, I particularly appreciated the comment by anonymous479 which allowed me to confirm that the parameter corresponding to the masked toggle (i.e. the reporting_enabled value in ~/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Origin-Nightly/Local State) is set to false.
It merely confirms that I had disabled it when I went through all the settings right after installation. (For a moment, I had a doubt. )
I just confirmed that in both of the test cases linked in my above post reporting_enabled is indeed set to false.[1] Even when the toggle was not modified by the user before browser restart.
What still confuses me here is that the UI of the “daily usage ping” still appears[2] on first boot, but disappears after the browser is restarted for the first time regardless of user intervention. This may not technically be broken, but it does feel weird from a user perspective.
) I looked everywhere, but maybe I missed it anyway.
)