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Brave browser adds email aliases to help users evade tracking

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Why This Matters

Brave browser's new Email Aliases feature enhances user privacy by allowing disposable email addresses, reducing the risk of identity tracking, spam, and phishing threats. This development underscores the ongoing effort in the tech industry to prioritize user privacy and security in online interactions.

Key Takeaways

The latest version of the Brave browser, 1.94, introduces a feature called ‘Email Aliases’ that allows users to generate disposable email addresses when signing up to a new service.

Using an alias address keeps the user's real email address hidden from the website while still forwarding messages from the service.

Brave already uses data isolation to prevent websites from inferring user identities based on cookie-based or cache correlations; however, email addresses are still stored on website servers, creating a privacy gap.

Brave’s new feature addresses this risk by blocking cross-site identity matching, reducing spam, and protecting users from threats such as phishing attacks that can follow data breaches.

“If a website you signed up for is hacked, your information can be leaked and end up with data brokers or worse,” explains Brave in the announcement.

“Your email address then circulates far beyond the company you originally trusted with it, and can show up in phishing campaigns for years afterward.”

To generate and use email aliases, users need to create a free Brave Account and register their primary email address with that account, so message forwarding can occur. This is separate from a Brave Premium account.

Managing email address aliases

Source: Brave

In a separate announcement, Brave explains that Brave Accounts uses OPAQUE, a password-authenticated key exchange standardized as RFC 9807, to authenticate users without transmitting their passwords or hashes to Brave’s servers.

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