Prevent Tracking: Apple Promotes Privacy Features in Safari

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Apple wants its users to know they can browse safely with Safari. That’s why the company launched a new campaign Tuesday evening that emphasizes how much better the app is at protecting data than the competition. This prevents cross-site tracking, helps protect location data and offers a new “private browsing” mode “with real-world protection.” The features are already live and part of Safari 17.

Apple's Click Tracking Against Mozilla and Google

Apple, which has built the feature into iOS as well as iPadOS and macOS, clearly wants to differentiate itself from competitors like Google or Mozilla. They’re currently working on third-party cookies that would allow advertisers to track users without identifying them. But Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” and Mozilla’s “Privacy Preserving Attribution” — which were recently enabled offline in Firefox — have been met with criticism. However, Apple can’t do without this functionality: it’s called “Attachment Toolkit” (formerly known as “Private Click Measurement”) and will also be active in “Private Browsing” mode in the future.

Like Apple in WebKit blog explainsbut this is limited to attribution in a single tab — this is only carried over to tabs that are called from there. If someone copies and pastes a link, it will no longer be tracked. “Because Private Browsing doesn’t retain data, pending attribution requests are ignored when the tab is closed.” There are also improvements to Link Tracking Protection. Here Safari now ignores parts of parameters to prevent cross-site tracking. Campaign tracking is allowed, however.

More privacy with Safari extensions

Apple has continued to work on WebExtensions support. Extensions that can access website data and browsing history are now disabled by default in Private Browsing mode. However, this is not new for other browsers. If websites are not loading via iCloud Private Relay, there will be a warning in the future in Private Browsing mode that you may be exposing your IP address.

Apple has already taken measures to combat fingerprinting in previous versions of Safari. Now it’s reportedly tightening them up again. “To combat fingerprinting, Safari offers trackers a simplified version of the system configuration so that more devices look identical and it becomes harder to identify a specific device,” the company said. “Many of our competitors don’t go this far.”

(Bachelor's)