Brave adds email aliases, one-upping Chrome on privacy

Chrome alternative Brave this week added email aliases, giving users a reason to switch: the feature lets people sign up for websites and other online services without sharing their personal email addresses. To use it, users first create a Brave account with their real email address. Once logged into the browser, clicking an email field on a website triggers a pop-up offering an alias instead (or, if the pop-up doesn’t appear, right-clicking the field). The alias fills in the website’s form, and any messages sent to it are forwarded to the user’s primary email account.

Brave says using an alias protects privacy because websites often use email addresses as personal identifiers to target users with ads — ad-tech companies like Meta can match the email a user gave a retailer with the address on file for that user elsewhere, letting them track purchases or browsing. An alias also limits exposure if a site where a user shared their email gets hacked, since attackers would otherwise learn the person’s primary address, which can be leaked to data brokers.

Brave says it built the feature to close this privacy gap, and that it doesn’t read the contents of emails sent to an alias, only processing them for spam and virus filtering before forwarding and then deleting them from its servers. All data in Brave accounts is encrypted at rest, and notes users save alongside an alias are stored locally on-device unless sync is enabled, in which case notes are encrypted end-to-end. Brave cautioned that some forwarded mail may initially land in spam folders while it builds up its reputation as a mail provider. For now, Brave users get five free email aliases, with more planned for Premium plan subscribers in the future.

Why it matters

By building alias-based email protection directly into the browser, Brave is folding a privacy tool once reserved for dedicated services into everyday web browsing, raising the bar for what a “private” browser is expected to include.