The Brave browser has added a feature anyone who has ever signed up to a website will understand immediately: instead of your real address, you give the site a generated alias address. The messages still reach you, but the site never learns the real address.

The mechanics are simple. You open an account with Brave using your real address. When you then click on an email field on any site, a suggestion appears offering to use an alias instead. If the suggestion does not appear, right-clicking the field opens the same option. Everything arriving at the alias is forwarded to your real inbox.

Why the address matters at all

Because it is not a contact - it is an identifier. You leave the same address at a clothes shop, at an airline, at some app you tried once and forgot. Each of them knows you are the same person. And advertising giants like Meta can cross-reference that address with the one they already hold on you - so suddenly they know what you looked at, what you bought and where.

The second reason is more mundane and more likely: sites get hacked. When that happens with an address you use everywhere, your real address ends up on lists that circulate for years. With an alias, only one alias leaks - and you can switch it off.

Brave says it does not read the content of the messages, only checks them for spam and viruses, and deletes them from its servers once they have been forwarded. Account data is encrypted, and the notes you keep alongside an alias stay locally on the device - unless you turn on synchronisation, in which case they are end-to-end encrypted.

The part worth reading twice

All of this is a company's claim about its own product. The whole model asks you to trust Brave with exactly what you are hiding from everyone else - the real address and all the mail passing through it. That does not mean they are lying. It means privacy here does not disappear, it relocates: from twenty sites to one company. Whether that trade suits you is your decision, but it is worth knowing it is a trade and not a solution.

There is a small technical note too: at the start, some forwarded mail may land in spam until Brave builds a reputation as a sender. And the number that sets the limit - for now five free aliases are on offer, with more going to users on a paid account.

Five addresses do not cover a serious sign-up habit. But for those few sites you trust least and still have to give something to - the feature does the job.