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Last year, Neowin reported on a privacy-focused study which examined how various web browsers ensure user privacy. Surprisingly or perhaps unsurprisingly, Google Chrome came out on top as the worst among all, edging out Microsoft's Edge. The two scored 76 and 63, respectively (the higher the score, the worse it is). To be fair to Chrome, Vivaldi was just as bad as Chrome as it scored 75. Mozilla's Firefox however did much better as it put up 50 out of 100. You can view the full scorecard in our dedicated article.
From time to time, however, Google keeps adding features that promise to enhance user privacy. A new report though agrees with the previous study as it suggests that Google Chrome offers "almost no native anti-fingerprinting defences, unlike Brave, Firefox, or Tor." The report investigated the features Google offers on Chrome to protect users against device fingerprinting and browser fingerprinting, among others. Sadly most of it seemed sub-par, leading the author to conclude that Google abandoned its Privacy Sandbox plans and "left us with nothing". Google did have its reasons which you can read about in our coverage.
If you are not aware, browser fingerprinting, similar to one in real life, is unique, and it provides tracking data to browsers that is exclusive to only us and our devices. Hence, it essentially hinders anonymity on the web. It works by generating a unique fingerprint for each user, grabbing data from their OS, GPU, CPU, and other hardware.
The issue is mainly because of how modern browsers have come to be. They are far more than just simple web access tools now as they act as full-fledged platforms that can handle logins, store passwords and PINs, sync data across devices, and track user activity for performance and personalization.
Hence unlike malware which typically raise immediate red flags, browser-level tracking is often built into its core functionality and is dependent on collecting user information. Thus browsers become sort of like a centralized hub of sensitive data by collecting everything from browsing history, session tokens, to saved credentials and device fingerprints, and things can easily go wrong.
And they can go from bad to worse on Chrome as it comes with "canvas, audio, WebGL, fonts and speech synthesis APIs completely unprotected," which means all that unique user data could be accessible to the online world.
Interestingly, Mozilla Firefox offers some native resistance against fingerprinting with the privacy.resistFingerprinting flag that can be enabled inside about:config. Brave, meanwhile, offers even better privacy protection with its built-in Farbling feature such that it blocks known fingerprinting scripts and randomizes canvas output so it changes every session, even though it displays correctly to the end user. Finally, Microsoft's own Edge also offers more than Google Chrome thanks to its Tracking Prevention feature and can limit fingerprint tracking.
Source: That Privacy Guy