As the title says, Brave Origin on Linux has daily usage ping ON by default, and it turns out that there’s only one chance to disable it in-browser.
Here’s my setting. I fresh installed the latest version of Brave Origin on my Linux Mint(I didn’t upgrade it from Brave), and activated without using the activation code(since it’s free on Linux.) The support page clearly states that Brave Origin has daily usage ping, crash logs, P3A, etc disabled by default.
However, this is what shows up when I open browser settings for the very first time after finishing install.
For those who are unable to read Korean, this is the “data collection” section.
The one on the top is whether to enable P3A (which is disabled), the one in the middle is whether to send daily usage Ping to Brave (which is enabled), and the bottom one is sending diagnostics(which is disabled).
Despite the support page, the ping option is enabled by default. And things get worse when I close the browser and restart it. This is what it looks like when opening the same settings page after restarting the browser.
As you can see, two options(P3A, daily ping) are removed (or hidden) from the menu entirely. And it does not appear again afterwards.
Since I can’t even see them from the settings menu, the two options should obviously be turned off, right?
Well, No. If I don’t manually turn off the send ping option, it remains enabled indefinitely. This can be confirmed by checking the local state file in /home/user/.config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Origin-Nightly/. When truly disabled, the reporting_enabled should be set to false as in the image below, which is not what it looks like when the menu is simply hidden.
To summarize,
- Brave Origin on Linux has send ping option enabled by default.
- It can only be disabled in-browser during the very first session, when installation has just completed. After that, the menu just disappears so you probably won’t even know that it’s turned on.
- To disable it, you manually have to edit the local state file, by adding the reporting_enabled entry and setting its value to false.
I also confirmed with WireShark that the Ping option does function properly, and actually sends user data.
This could very well be a bug, but personally, I think there’s a lot of malice behind it.