Brave does not know your location. If you’d like localized search results you can choose to filter based on your computer’s IP address. Neither your IP address nor any other geographical data will be stored or shared.
Most people expect to see localized search results. For example, the search query “restaurants near me” would return a list of restaurants in the user’s immediate vicinity. This is the default mode for nearly all search engines—mobile or desktop.
However, for this functionality to work the search engine must know your physical location. Search engines can use a number of methods for this, one of which is the IP address broadcast by your device.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. The problem is that other, non-private search engines store this location data and pair it with other personal data about you—they know both who you are and where you are. And they share this personalized information with advertisers.
Brave is different. While the request in this toggle—to enable anonymous local results—would allow Brave to use the IP address your machine is already pinging to serve up the localized search results you’re accustomed to seeing, it differs in three key ways:
- We do not pinpoint the IP address to a physical address, but rather to a general location
- Your IP is used once, for the location-based query only; it is not stored
- The Brave browser is private by default, meaning we neither know nor store any identifying information about you; it is impossible for us to pair location data with other identifying information
For the best, most familiar experience possible, we recommend that you enable anonymous local results. Alternatively, you could specify location in your specific search query.