Brave said on November 12, 2026 that its desktop browser now removes an identifier Meta writes into the hidden metadata of Facebook and Instagram photos, deleting the value whenever a user saves such an image and sending a clean copy whenever a user uploads one, starting with version 1.98.

The identifier is a string that begins with the letters FBMD. According to Brave, Meta "hasn't revealed exactly what it uses this identifier for or why it is added to image metadata," and the company concedes in the same passage that "it's possible Meta doesn't use the identifier for tracking." Its case for removing the value anyway rests on what it could do: tie the same picture, and therefore possibly the same person, to accounts that were meant to stay apart.

The announcement is the 40th entry in Brave's privacy updates series. It was written by Shivan Kaul Sahib, the company's VP of Privacy and Security, and describes work by Rohit Agarwal, a senior software engineer. It arrived roughly two weeks after the feature itself shipped. A day later, on November 13, Brave's company page on LinkedIn condensed the argument into two sentences: "Meta hasn't said what the identifier is for. To be safe, we're removing it."

In Short

Brave's desktop browser now deletes a hidden code that Meta adds to photos on Facebook and Instagram, both when you download a picture and when you upload one. Meta has never publicly explained what the code is for, but because it stays the same when a photo is downloaded and re-posted by someone else, Brave argues it could link separate accounts back to one person. Photos saved or shared through Brave on desktop no longer carry that code, while Android, iOS and the removal of location, device and date details are still plans rather than products.

What changed in version 1.98

"Starting with desktop version 1.98, Brave browser automatically removes the hidden identifiers that Meta adds to your photos on Instagram and Facebook," according to the post. The stated goal is narrow. "This removal makes it harder for Meta to link the same photo across accounts and sites."

Brave steps in at two moments. When an image is saved, the browser removes the identifier "before the download finishes," which, according to the company, protects the file "even if you upload the image later with another browser or app." When an image is uploaded to any website, "Brave uploads a clean copy. The original file on your computer stays as it is."

The second step is the broader of the two. A Facebook photo saved in another browser last year still carries the value on disk; Brave's upload path is designed to catch it on the way out, wherever the file came from. Brave illustrates the result with the same Facebook photo opened in Chrome and in Brave: only the Chrome copy shows the FBMD identifier.

The feature is limited to desktop. Brave says it plans "to bring this feature to Android and iOS," without a date. On the company's public issue tracker, the engineer leading the work wrote in October that Android was not scoped for the current launch, and a Brave team member coordinating the tests noted that iOS was out of scope.

The post describes the removal as automatic and does not mention a setting to switch it off. During testing in September, the stripper sat behind an experimental flag named brave-strip-image-metadata-v1, according to the test plan published on GitHub. Brave's post does not say whether that flag still governs the feature or whether every desktop user has it enabled.

The shipping date is also earlier than the post implies. Brave's release notes for desktop version 1.98.60, posted on its community forum on October 27, 2026, listed the ability to strip metadata from images on download and upload. They did not mention Meta, Facebook or Instagram. By the time the privacy post went up on November 12, Brave's release notes page already listed three desktop releases in the 1.99 line, the most recent dated that same day.

The series has moved quickly this year. The 39th post, on August 27, 2026, introduced Email Aliases in desktop version 1.94. Two weeks before that, on August 13, Brave began rolling out version 1.93 with three GPU fingerprinting signals cut by default, work that also involved Agarwal and was also written up by Kaul Sahib.

What FBMD is, and what is known about it

Every digital photo can carry information its viewers never see. "That extra, invisible information is called metadata, and it contains things like date, time, GPS location, and camera model. Any app or website that opens the file can read it," the post explains. Some of it is useful. "Metadata can have legitimate uses (for example, photo apps use it to sort your library by date or place). But it can also reveal more than you meant to share."

Meta's value sits in IPTC metadata, the format the International Press Telecommunications Council set so that photographers and publishers can embed captions, credits and copyright notices in an image file. Brave says Meta stores its identifier in the "Special Instructions" field. The IPTC's own 2019 write-up calls the same field "Instructions".

The existence of the value is not news. The IPTC's Photo Metadata Working Group tested what Facebook does to embedded metadata in spring 2019 and published its findings on July 22 that year. According to the IPTC, Facebook removed every field in the XMP format and, in the older IIM and Exif formats, kept only a handful of rights fields, such as creator, copyright notice and credit line, while discarding the rest. It also added values of its own. The Instructions field came back holding a string that started with FBMD, and when a second user downloaded the photo and uploaded it again, the value did not change. A separate Job Id field, by contrast, changed with every upload. Facebook had not publicly documented the role of either value, the IPTC noted.

Brave's summary of that test matches. "Facebook removed most of the metadata people uploaded, but added a value to the 'Special Instructions' field. The value starts with 'FBMD' and is followed by a long string of characters. When a second person downloaded the photo and uploaded it again, the value stayed the same," the post says. Then the update: "Brave ran the same test in July 2026 and found the identifier is still there."

Seven years on, the public record has barely moved. The string persists. Its purpose remains undisclosed. And that gap is the whole basis of Brave's decision. "However, with no public information, we have to take into account any possibility and the effects on user privacy," according to the post.

Brave's scenario: two accounts, one photo

To show what is at stake, the post sets out a hypothetical. Someone runs an Instagram account under a different name from the real-name Facebook profile that family and colleagues know. The two accounts use separate email aliases, and the person may even route traffic through a VPN to keep their IP address from Meta. A friend posts images on Facebook urging people to vote. The person downloads one and reposts it on the pseudonymous Instagram account.

"Unknown to you, Meta added a hidden identifier to that photo. Because the identifier travels with the file, Meta could use it to connect your Instagram account to your friend's Facebook post, and to the real-name network around it," according to Brave. The post then lists what could follow: "Once that connection exists, it's out of your hands: Meta could suggest your Instagram account to people who know you from Facebook. The link could leak in a data breach, or be handed over in response to a legal request."

The verbs matter. Every consequence is something Meta "could" do. Brave presents no case in which FBMD was used to connect accounts, and the identifier as described marks a file, not a person. Whether a persistent marker on a file becomes a link between people depends on what Meta does with it when the file is uploaded, which is exactly what nobody outside the company has documented.

Marketers will recognise the mechanics under another name. Matching signals across accounts, devices and properties to a single individual is identity resolution, the process behind cross-platform targeting and measurement. A value that survives download and re-upload by a different person is, at the very least, a record of where a file has travelled.

How the stripper works

The component itself is small. "Brave's metadata stripper is written in C++ with no extra libraries, so it stays small and fast," the post says, inviting readers to follow the work on GitHub.

That work has a long history. The relevant issue, number 5238, asks for metadata to be stripped from images on download and upload. A user opened it on July 14, 2019, eight days before the IPTC published its Facebook findings, arguing that Facebook, Instagram and other services added IPTC metadata to images to track user behaviour. Comments followed within days. Then the thread went quiet for long stretches, with a pair of comments in November 2023 and one in January 2025, until engineering work picked up in 2026.

A test plan posted on September 25, 2026 set version 1.98.31 as the minimum and checked for the presence of FBMD in files handled three ways: downloads, uploads through a file picker, and uploads by drag-and-drop, each run with the feature flag on and off. Brave closed the issue as completed on October 8, 2026, under its 1.98.x release milestone, which carried a due date of October 22. The closing comment said most of the changes had landed and that they addressed the original requirement to strip FBMD, while noting that a few sub-issues were still open. Testers then signed off the plan on macOS with version 1.98.55, on Windows with 1.98.57 and on Linux with 1.98.58, the last on October 21.

From opening to closing, the request took 2,643 days, by PPC Land's calculation from the dates on the issue.

Brave also gives readers a way to check its claims. The post points to an image metadata viewer that "runs entirely in your browser", hosted on shivankaul.com, the personal website of the post's author, and to the IPTC's Get IPTC Photo Metadata tool. The procedure is simple: save a Facebook photo in a browser without the protection, such as Chrome, open the file in the viewer and look for a Special Instructions value beginning with FBMD; then open the same file in the viewer using Brave. "The 'FBMD' value is gone," the post says.

What the post leaves open

Scope is the first gap. The post describes removing "the FBMD identifier" specifically. It does not say whether the rights fields Facebook preserves, such as creator and copyright notice, pass through untouched, nor whether markers added by any other platform are removed. Early outside coverage read the feature more broadly. PiunikaWeb, writing on October 28 about the 1.98.60 release notes, described a tool that strips GPS location, date and device details from images. Brave's own post, two weeks later, places precisely those categories in the future.

"This is just the beginning. In the future, we'd like to add the ability to remove geolocation, device, date, and time data from images," according to the post. That data, the company says, "might have legitimate uses (e.g. organizing your online photo library), so we'll give you control over when Brave removes it."

Provenance is a second. Platforms increasingly read embedded data when deciding how to label an image, and the C2PA standard attaches signed Content Credentials to files for exactly that purpose. Brave's current stripper targets one Meta value, so its effect on such records looks limited. The planned broader removal, even under user control, would come closer to that territory. The post does not discuss it.

Meta's side is the third. The post carries no response from Meta. Nothing in it indicates whether the value plays any role in advertising, recommendations, integrity systems or duplicate detection, and any claim either way would be speculation.

Why it matters for the advertising market

The direct effect on campaigns is hard to measure and probably small. Meta has never documented FBMD as an advertising signal, Brave's desktop users are a fraction of Meta's audience, and the change does not touch the Meta Pixel, server-side conversion feeds or any ad product.

The direction of travel is another matter. Browser makers have been removing identifiers one at a time. In June 2025, Meta halted a covert Android tracking technique in which its Pixel passed a browser cookie to localhost ports where the Facebook and Instagram apps were listening, after researchers including Günes Acar of Radboud University and Narseo Vallina-Rodríguez of IMDEA Networks disclosed it. Brave was listed as unaffected, because the browser had required consent for localhost communications since 2022. Fourteen months later came the GPU fingerprinting changes in version 1.93. FBMD moves the contest from scripts and cookies to the image files people pass around.

Meta, meanwhile, has been consolidating identity inside its own walls. On November 5, 2026, it emailed users to say their Accounts Center had been converted into a Meta Account, with no way to decline. And on November 12, the same day Brave published its post, a Meta Pixel setting that measures conversions on customers' devices was due to switch on by default for datasets already sending events, unless advertisers opted out.

Brave is not a disinterested observer. It sells advertising through Brave Ads and Brave Search, and on November 10 it said its search engine handled 2.7 billion queries in October 2026, up 56% on a year earlier, with users rising to more than 130 million, although the same release's About section put the figure at 128.3 million. Earlier in the year, Brave's chief of ads Jean-Paul Schmetz described a model in which Brave blocks other companies' ads and sells its own. Its privacy updates are product announcements for a browser that competes with Chrome, from a company that competes with Meta and Google for budgets. It is also a defendant: on November 2, The New York Times and three other papers sued Brave over its AI answers and ad blocking.

None of that changes the technical finding. The IPTC documented the persistent value in 2019, Brave says it was still there in July 2026, and Meta has not explained it. For photographers and publishers who depend on embedded credits, and for advertisers who depend on Meta's ability to recognise people across its apps, the question Brave raises is a reasonable one. What is a marker that survives re-upload by a stranger actually used for?

Timeline

Summary

Who: Brave Software, through a post by Shivan Kaul Sahib, VP of Privacy and Security, describing work by senior software engineer Rohit Agarwal; Meta, whose Facebook and Instagram platforms add the identifier; and the International Press Telecommunications Council, which documented the identifier in 2019.

What: Brave's desktop browser, from version 1.98, removes a metadata value beginning with FBMD that Meta adds to Facebook and Instagram photos. It deletes the value when an image is downloaded and uploads a clean copy when an image is posted to a website, leaving the original file unchanged. Removal of location, device, date and time data is planned, with user control.

When: Brave published the explanation on November 12, 2026, and summarised it on LinkedIn on November 13. The feature appeared in release notes for version 1.98.60 on October 27, 2026, closing a GitHub request opened on July 14, 2019.

Where: Brave on desktop, tested on Windows, macOS and Linux. Android and iOS versions are planned without a date. The identifier sits in the IPTC metadata of images served by Facebook and Instagram.

Why: Meta has never publicly explained the identifier, and because it survives download and re-upload by another person, Brave argues it could link pseudonymous accounts to real-name profiles. Brave acknowledges Meta may not use it for tracking at all. For the advertising market, the change is one more identifier removed by a browser that also sells its own ads, arriving on the day Meta's on-device conversion measurement was scheduled to become a default for Pixel advertisers.