Apple’s elaborate new ad campaign promises that Safari is “a browser that protects your privacy.” And the Washington Post says Apple “deserves credit for making many privacy protections automatic with Safari…”
“But Albert Fox Cahn, 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 at the Olympics, Apple isn’t getting on the medal stand,” Cahn said. (Apple did not comment about this.)
Safari stops third-party cookies anywhere you go on the web. So do Mozilla’s Firefox and the Brave browser… Chrome allows third-party cookies in most cases unless you turn them off… Even without cookies, a website can pull information like the resolution of your computer screen, the fonts you have installed, add-on software you use and other technical details that in aggregate can help identify your device and what you’re doing on it. The measures, typically called “fingerprinting,” are privacy-eroding tracking by another name. Nick Doty with the Center for Democracy & Technology said there’s generally not much you can do about fingerprinting. Usually you don’t know you’re being tracked that way. Apple says it defends against common fingerprinting techniques but Cahn said Firefox, Brave and the Tor Browser all are better at protecting you from digital surveillance. That’s why he said Safari is no better than the fourth-best browser for privacy.
Safari’s does offer extra privacy protections in its “private” mode, the article points out. “When you use this option, Apple says it does more to block use of ‘advanced’ fingerprinting techniques. It also steps up defenses against tracking that adds bits of identifying information to the web links you click.”
The article concludes that Safari users can “feel reasonably good about the privacy (and security) protections, but you can probably do better — either by tweaking your Apple settings or using a web browser that’s even more private than Safari.”
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