Straight answers about how Epic works, what it can't do, and who is behind it.
We believe that what you browse online should be private. What you browse is no one's business but your own. Privacy is essential to a free internet. When you're under surveillance or being tracked, you think twice before investigating certain ideas or visiting certain websites. Through internalized self-censorship, this creates a kind of prison in our minds. We believe in free investigation, free minds, and a free internet.
Your browsing history reveals a lot about who you are. It's often bundled with offline data like your purchases, location, credit history and identity, and sold on data exchanges every day. It can be used to determine whether you get health or life insurance, what price you're charged at online stores, your job application status, and much more. Beyond that, privacy is essential to freedom of thought: if you know you're under surveillance, you're significantly less likely to research or express minority views.
Yes. The Wall Street Journal reported that websites vary prices based on user information: two shoppers living a few miles apart saw a 10% price difference for the same product on the same site. Offline data is merged with online data and sold to insurers and others. The CEO of one firm that analyzes online data for insurers admitted to buying junk food with cash to avoid being labeled unhealthy.
Your browsing can be used to determine whether you get health, auto or life insurance, a job, and much more. The Big Data industry, into which billions of dollars are invested, has designs to collect and use your personal data in exactly these ways.
Epic removes all Google services from Chromium so your browsing doesn't go through Google's servers. It blocks thousands of trackers and widgets, prefers encrypted connections, always blocks third-party cookies and sends a Do Not Track signal. Epic never collects data about your browsing or searches beyond basic tallies such as bandwidth through our servers. Services like address-bar autofill are local, so what you type is never sent anywhere. And Epic can run always in private mode, so your browsing data is deleted when you close it.
No browser can provide total privacy, and that includes Epic. Epic provides as much privacy as possible while still offering a fast, normal browsing experience. It blocks most but not all fingerprinting techniques. Plugins can leak your IP address, though almost none are active by default. We never log browsing history or website visits, and have said so to every government agency that has requested data. Forensic tools can recover browsing data after any browser closes, including Tor; we haven't addressed this because many OS-level files outside our control cache data. For resistance to forensic recovery, TAILS is the most reputable tool, though it's not easy to set up.
Epic has strong, built-in anti-fingerprinting protections that you can control granularly via the Epic umbrella button, where you can also see block counts. Epic blocks prevalent methods including image canvas data, font canvas data, ultrasound signals, audiocontext, battery status and tracking scripts.
Incognito mode doesn't stop anyone from tracking you. It stops someone with access to your computer from seeing your history, but your browsing and searches are still tracked by Google's servers, hundreds of data collectors, your ISP, your employer and others. Your history is also still accessible via your DNS cache after the window closes.
Add-ons can access all your browsing, searches and almost everything you type. Some have been found to save and sell browsing history. No set of privacy add-ons for any browser provides the full protection you get running Epic.
Tor is a network that helps provide anonymity, with a browser based on Firefox. It's useful when you must have the highest level of anonymity at the expense of speed and website functionality. For day-to-day browsing, Epic is a more natural choice: a browsing experience similar to or faster than your current browser. Note that Tor nodes are run by volunteers, including some malicious groups who have carried out serious attacks on Tor users.
Yes, but better. Epic is built on Chromium, the same base as Chrome, so it inherits Chrome's speed and security. Because Epic blocks so many tracking scripts and requests, pages usually load faster.
Yes, Chrome Web Store extensions are supported in the desktop Epic browsers. Please install only essential ones; many have been found to save and sell browsing history.
Yes, please do. Epic allows first-party cookies and HTML5 storage, without which most websites wouldn't work, so it's important to clean that out regularly. With always-on private mode enabled, closing Epic deletes all stored data with no further effort from you.
If you search via Google in Epic, we strongly recommend not logging into Gmail at the same time. Google's privacy policy lets it aggregate your personal data across all its services, so if you're logged in, Google can track your searches.
Chromium is an open-source project led by Google and the base of the Chrome browser. All its code is free for anyone to use. Chromium also uses a great deal of open-source code from KDE, Apple, Mozilla and others.
Windows users: use Uninstall Programs in Windows settings. Mac users: drag the Epic Privacy Browser icon to the trash.
Our software development team operates out of Bangalore. Graham Holdings (formerly the Washington Post Company) and a small group of angel investors back us.
Epic earns revenue via our default search partner and from paid subscribers to our private, ad-free search engine, EpicSearch.in. We don't run an ad network, sell data, or operate a rewards token.
All of Epic's code is accessible and auditable by anyone, and Epic is built on open-source Chromium. We don't keep Epic in an online repo because Epic is not a fork but a modified version of Chromium, so the codebase changes with each Chromium release. If you would like any files, or want to contribute, write to us.
Google annulled it a few years ago. We were always transparent about how it worked and what data we shared: to retrieve search ads and on ad click, we relayed a masked IP address for approximate location. It's unfortunate Google cancelled it just as consumer interest in privacy was growing.