BROWSE PRIVATELY ON YOUR PHONE & TABLET
All six of the private browsers we’ve reviewed here are also available on your phone or tablet, and their mobile apps offer extra privacy tools. For example, the Brave app for Android (www.snipca. com/40730) includes a feature called ‘Privacy report’ (see screenshot below) that goes further than its desktop counterpart by listing the domains of all the trackers and ad servers it’s blocked , so you can identify repeat offenders.
Brave’s IOS app (www.snipca. com/40733) is even more powerful, boosting the privacy and security of your entire iphone or ipad through its combined firewall and VPN, though this costs $9.99 (£7.50) per month or $99.99 ($75) a year, after a seven-day free trial.
Tor Browser doesn’t have an official IOS app, but the Tor Project recommends using Onion Browser (www.snipca. com/40732), which is powered by Tor and offers many of the same features. On Android, the Tor Browser app (www. snipca.com/40734) offers options you don’t get in the desktop version, including a password manager and a selection of approved privacy add-ons, but it’s still quite slow.
Firefox offers both a mobile version of its desktop browser and a pared-down, privacy-focused app called Firefox Focus – get links to both, for Android and IOS, at www.snipca.com/40736. The latter is the one to install to stay anonymous on your phone and tablet, because it blocks most trackers by default, and can also block scripts and other risky web content. The Android version of Firefox Focus just added Total Cookie Protection, which we covered in Issue 624’s ‘Phone and Tablet
Tips’ (page 44).
However, our favourite free app for browsing anonymously on your mobile device is Duckduckgo Privacy Browser, for Android (www.snipca.com/40738) and IOS (www.snipca.com/40739). This automatically blocks trackers and data collection, keeps your searches completely private, forces websites to use encrypted HTTPS connections, has a handy Fire button that instantly deletes your tabs and browsing data (see screenshot above), and will soon block trackers in emails and apps. Duckduckgo is working on a desktop version of the browser (see last section at www.snipca. com/40740), which could potentially bump Brave from our top spot.