Brave Ships With The Blocking Turned On
Most browsers give you privacy protections you have to find and enable. Brave inverts that. Shields are on by default for every site, with no extensions to install and nothing to configure. Brave's own description of what Shields stop is a short list: "Trackers. Cross-site cookies. Phishing. Fingerprinting." All of it, from the first page load.
Brave's audience is small next to Chrome, but it's disproportionately the technical, privacy-conscious users many B2B and SaaS sites care about. If those visitors matter to you, it's worth knowing exactly what Shields do to your tags, because the answer is different from Safari or Firefox.
How Shields Block Trackers
Brave leans on the same community blocklists ad blockers use, then adds its own. Per Brave, it applies filters from "the EasyList and EasyPrivacy projects, the uBlock Origin project, and lists Brave has generated internally." Known ad and tracker domains are blocked before they load.
On top of the lists, Shields do two structural things:
- Cross-site cookie blocking. Third-party storage is replaced with ephemeral, per-site storage that auto-deletes, so a tracker can't carry an identifier from one site to the next.
- CNAME uncloaking. Like Safari, Brave detects trackers hiding behind a subdomain alias and blocks them anyway, so routing a tracker through
track.yoursite.comdoesn't slip past.
There are two levels. Standard is the default and aims for the best privacy that still works on most sites. Aggressive applies more protections at a higher risk of breaking pages.
Farbling: Randomizing Your Fingerprint
The part that sets Brave apart is how it handles fingerprinting, the technique of identifying a visitor from the combination of their device and browser characteristics rather than from a cookie. Brave's approach is called farbling: it slightly randomizes the output of semi-identifying browser features, enough to defeat tracking but not enough for a human to notice.
The clever detail is consistency. The randomized values are generated from a per-session, per-site seed, so a single site sees the same fingerprint each time it checks during one session, but a different site sees a different value, and everything reshuffles when the browser restarts. To a fingerprinting script, the same person looks like a different visitor on every site and every session. For the mechanics of why this matters, see Browser Fingerprinting and Why Browsers Block It.
Brave Doesn't Break Your Site
A common worry is that Brave's blocking makes sites unusable, so anything you build gets mangled for those visitors. In practice that's rare, and it helps to know why. Brave is built on Chromium, the same engine as Chrome, so your pages render the way they would in Chrome, minus the trackers. First-party essentials keep working: your login session, shopping cart, language preference, and other functional first-party cookies aren't the target. Shields go after cross-site tracking, not the cookies that make your own site work.
What breaks, occasionally, is a page that genuinely depends on a blocked third party, like an embedded widget served from a tracker domain. Even then, a user can lower Shields for a single site with one click if they want the content. The takeaway for you: design so that core functionality never rides on a third-party tracker, and Brave users get a working site with the tracking stripped out, which is exactly the outcome the browser intends.
Shields Can Hide Your Consent Banner
The blocklists Brave uses (EasyList, EasyPrivacy, uBlock Origin lists) sometimes include rules that target consent management scripts and cookie-notice "annoyances." That means a Brave user, or anyone running the same lists in an ad blocker, may never see your banner render. This doesn't remove your legal obligation, and it doesn't give you permission to track them. If your setup only blocks tags through banner UI that itself gets blocked, your protection has a hole. The safe design blocks non-essential tags before consent at the loader level, so trackers stay off even when the visible banner never appears. See How to Block Scripts Before Consent.
What Brave Users Mean For Your Data
Assume that for a Brave visitor on default Shields, most third-party analytics and ad tags never fire, cross-site cookies don't persist, and any fingerprinting-based identification returns randomized, useless values. Your first-party, same-site measurement can still work if the tags aren't on a blocklist, but plan for these users to be substantially invisible to conventional tracking.
That's not a problem to solve so much as a reality to model. Some share of your audience has opted out at the browser level, permanently and by choice. Server-side, consent-based first-party measurement recovers some of it lawfully; nothing recovers all of it, and trying to defeat farbling or unblock Shields would be both futile and hostile to the user.
Where CookieBeam Fits
Because Brave and its blocklists can strip a consent banner's UI, CookieBeam is built to fail closed: non-essential scripts are held until a consent signal exists, so a Brave user who never sees the banner still isn't tracked without a basis. Our scanner detects the outbound network connections your pages make, alongside the cookies and scripts, which is how you catch fingerprinting and cookieless tracking that leaves no cookie behind. One honest note: the scanner runs in a standard Chromium environment, so it reports the full set of trackers your site loads, not the near-empty set a Brave user actually experiences after Shields do their work.
Related Guides and Sources
Keep reading: Ad Blockers vs Cookie Consent, Safari ITP Explained for Marketers, and Firefox Total Cookie Protection and ETP. Primary source: Brave's Brave Shields documentation, covering the default blocking, filter lists, Standard vs Aggressive modes, and fingerprint randomization.