But Albert Fox Kahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said Safari is no better than the fourth-best web browser for your privacy.
“If browser privacy were a sport in the Olympics, Apple wouldn’t be on the medal stand,” Kahn said. (Apple has not commented on this.)
The bottom line if you use Safari: You should feel pretty good about privacy (and security) protections, but you can probably do better — either by changing Apple’s settings or using a web browser that’s even more private than Safari. I’ll dig into the details.
🟢 Safari automatically stops tracking cookies.
These small software files are used by many websites and are standard on the most popular web browser, Google’s Chrome, to track where you roam online.
Web tracking cookies are probably why you’re seeing online ads for shoes after you’ve searched for running shoes once.
Cookies can be useful or harmless individually. On a mass scale, however, cookies help companies collect digital records about your income, location, interest in mental illness, love of horror movies, and other things you might not want insurance companies or supermarkets digging up.
Safari stops third-party cookies wherever you go on the web. So do Mozilla’s Firefox and the Brave browser. You can use one of them on a Windows PC, Mac, iPhone, or Android device. Safari is only available for Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Chrome allows third-party cookies in most cases unless you turn them off. Read how about Chrome and the Microsoft Edge browser. (You may not be able to do this if you use a Google or Microsoft account managed by your employer.)
🟡 Safari allows other types of tracking.
Even without cookies, a website can download information such as your computer’s screen resolution, the fonts you have installed, additional software you use, and other technical details that, in the aggregate, can help identify your device and that, what you do to it.
The measures, commonly referred to as “fingerprinting,” are privacy-eroding tracking by another name. Nick Doty of the Center for Democracy and Technology said there’s usually not much you can do about fingerprints. You usually don’t know you’re being followed this way.
Apple says it protects against common fingerprinting techniques, but Kahn said Firefox, Brave and Tor Browser are better at protecting you from digital surveillance. That’s why he said Safari is no better than the fourth best browser for privacy.
It’s fantastic that big companies like Apple and Meta and smaller organizations are competing to win you over with privacy features.
Adding privacy protection also has trade-offs, including disabling parts of websites you need. Smaller browsers may have the freedom to be more aggressive about privacy than Apple, which risks annoying website owners, advertisers, regulators and some users when it tightens privacy protections.
Using the handy “Cover Your Tracks” privacy test from the consumer privacy nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, my iPhone using the Safari browser showed that I have partial protection from common types of data tracking.
I got a similar result using the Firefox browser on an Android phone. A computer using the Chrome browser failed the EFF tracking protection test.
🟡 Safari’s “Private” mode isn’t private to everyone.
This is the time to remind you about the limitations of “private” or “incognito” modes in web browsers.
When you use this mode in Safari, your device’s web browser won’t record what websites you’ve viewed or what web searches you’ve performed.
This can be useful if you’re using a shared computer at a public library, or if you’re using your household computer to shop for a surprise gift or use adult sites.
But as with most other browsers, the websites you use, your home ISP or your workplace may still know the sites you’ve visited. If you’re using a virtual private network—software that protects your location—the VPN’s owner is likely logged in where you’re going, even in private mode.
Mozilla has a helpful myth-busting document about Firefox’s private browsing mode, which may apply to other browsers as well.
🟢 Safari’s “Private” mode has additional privacy protections.
When you use this option, Apple says it does more to block the use of “advanced” fingerprint techniques. It also strengthens protections against tracking, which adds bits of identifying information to the web links you click. Lock whatever you do on the web so no one but you can see it.
You can turn on private mode for everything you do in Safari, but there can be drawbacks. Apple says that if you use Private Browsing all the time, some parts of websites may not work properly.
If you choose this option: On iPhone, go to the Settings app → Safari → Advanced → Advanced Tracking and Fingerprint Protection → change to “All Browsing”.
