Safari protects your privacy through a combination of default settings and specific features designed to limit tracking and control your data.
At its core, Safari includes built-in protections that work in the background to prevent websites and third parties from collecting unnecessary information about your browsing habits. This includes sophisticated measures against cross-site tracking and digital fingerprinting.
Key Privacy Features in Safari
Safari employs several mechanisms to help safeguard your personal information as you browse the web:
- Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP): This feature uses on-device machine learning to identify and limit trackers, preventing them from collecting data about your browsing across different websites. It works by restricting the data that trackers can access and setting limits on how long they can store cookies and website data.
- Privacy Report: Safari provides a Privacy Report that shows you which trackers have been blocked on the websites you visit. This gives you visibility into the tracking attempts you encounter online.
- Secure Passwords: Safari can generate strong, unique passwords for your online accounts and securely store them in iCloud Keychain. It also monitors your saved passwords for potential compromises.
- Pop-up Blocker: By default, Safari blocks most unwanted pop-up windows, which can sometimes be used for malicious purposes or tracking.
Private Browsing
One significant way Safari protects your privacy is through its Private Browsing mode. As highlighted in the reference:
When it's activated, Safari won't add the sites you visit to your history, remember your searches, or save any information from forms you fill out online — and advanced tracking and fingerprinting protections go even further to help prevent websites from tracking or identifying your device.
When you use Private Browsing, Safari takes these specific steps:
- No Browsing History: Websites you visit are not added to your history list.
- Forget Search History: Your search queries are not remembered.
- Discard Form Data: Information you enter into online forms (like names or addresses) is not saved for future use.
- Enhanced Tracking Protection: It includes advanced tracking and fingerprinting protections designed to make it harder for websites to follow you across the web or uniquely identify your device based on its characteristics.
Private Browsing is useful for sessions where you don't want your activity to be recorded locally on your device or easily trackable by websites.
Customizing Privacy Settings
Safari also allows you to customize various privacy settings, giving you control over cookies, location access, camera and microphone access, and more, further enhancing your privacy posture.
By combining these features, Safari aims to provide a safer and more private browsing experience for its users.
