Apple today shared a new privacy-focused Safari ad, which is designed to highlight the ways that Safari protects user privacy compared to other browsers.
Watch on YouTubeIn the spot, security cameras are positioned as pesky birds and bats, hovering around smartphone users as they browse the web. The cameras are everywhere, representing website trackers. Much of the ad is focused on non-iPhone users, but toward the end, iPhone users opens up Safari and all the creepy cameras explode in mid-air.
The video is accompanied by billboards in cities around the world and short digital ads that are being shown on social networks. Apple has also highlighted some of the recent privacy updates made to Safari on its WebKit blog.
Safari has long protected advertisers from tracking users across the web with cross-site tracking, and it uses Intelligent Tracking Prevention to suss out and block domains collecting tracking data.
IP addresses are hidden from known trackers in Safari, as this can be used to identify users across websites, plus location information is not shared without express user permission and with optional time limitations. To cut down on fingerprinting, a tracking technique that uses system configuration info, Safari provides limited information to trackers to make devices look more identical.
The Safari Private Browsing mode offers an option to use a different search engine, it strips information added to URLs for tracking purposes, it has a content blocker to block network requests from known trackers, and it restricts web extensions that have access to webpage content and browsing history.
iCloud+ subscribers have additional protections with iCloud Private Relay and Safari Private Browsing, including separate sessions for every tab so sites can't tell if two tabs came from the same device and a non-specific IP location based on country and time zone.
Tracking preventions that Apple designed specifically for Private Browsing mode are enabled by default when in that mode, but they can also be enabled for regular browsing by going to Settings > Apps > Safari > Advanced > Advanced Tracking and Fingerprinting Protection on an iPhone and toggling on the "All Browsing" feature. On a Mac, the setting can be found under Safari > Settings > Advanced.
According to Apple, a number of Safari's protections are not offered by other browsers such as Chrome, which makes Safari the ideal choice for privacy. Safari's unique features include using machine learning to combat cross-site tracking, removing unique trackers from URLs in Private Browsing, hiding IP address from known trackers, preventing web extensions from seeing browsing by default, not sharing location data with search engine, and blocking known trackers in Private Browsing.
More information on Safari's privacy protections can be found on Apple's privacy website, with specific technical information available on the WebKit blog.
