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Apple Launches New Safari Ad Campaign: 'A Browser That's Actually Private'

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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.


In 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.

Article Link: Apple Launches New Safari Ad Campaign: 'A Browser That's Actually Private'
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/07/16/apple-safari-ad-campaign/
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Cool ad from the company hat accepts $20 billion to set Google as the default search engine in its devices.

Also, on Android other browser engines are allowed, not only WebKit. You can use Firefox with uBlock Origin there. The filtering solution used in Safari is nowhere near uBlock's capabilities.
 
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cuiver said:
Cool ad from the company hat accepts $20 billion to set Google as the default search engine in its devices.

Also, on Android other browser engines are allowed, not only WebKit. You can use Firefox with uBlock Origin there. The filtering solution used in Safari is nowhere near uBlock's capabilities.
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Are you implying they should have duckduckgo as the search engine?
 
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arkitect said:
No, I think they're implying that Apple are hypocritical.

I think the word you were looking for was suggesting.
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And I'm implying that the only defaults you're going to end up with will still be tracking you. Both of these are implications, btw, which is why I had to ask.
 
Weird how they openly tell you in their tagline that they’re invading our privacy smh lol jk

they still accept money from Google and use them as their search default so…
 
So I tried the Adblocks and Adguard again, just to be on the safe side legally posting this:

Like every time I tried this in the last decade, Safari still opens connections to dozens of trackers anyways, and its cache gets filled with their data. Test for yourself.

Hands down the best, and probably the only feasible protection against profiling is a decent blocking API, and Safari + extensions is REALLY, REALLY BAD at this.
 
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Let’s be honest, Apple knows it’s losing some ground with the latest changes in the EU requiring alternate browsing engines and changes to the default browser experience. This is Apple’s way of turning more customers in its direction since it lost some control due to government regulation.

I’m not here to debate whether or not those regulations are called for, but Apple has been using privacy as a marketing tool for a while now. And it can’t keep that sweet $20 billion deal with Google if its browser numbers start dropping off.
 
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ghostface147 said:
Sometimes that privacy causes issues. Sites often never remember me.
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The default policy for browser should be to delete site data on closing the last tab for a site, except for a whitelist. Safari has this for other website features (Settings, Websites), but not for the cache. On Chrome Ungoogled Chromium, there is Cookie Autodelete, which does exactly that, and it mostly works.
 
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I wish Apple would spend this time improving Safari versus advertising it. It still reloads all my tabs if I dare to switch apps on my iPad.

And before someone tells me to switch to a different browser - I'm not interested in pretending that Safari in a trenchcoat is actually Firefox.
 
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UliBaer said:
Of course it does, to get the latest block lists for uBlock origin to fight the latest ad-spam-technologies!
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Yes, correct, but you can even switch that off, and bam, zero automated connections. Updating filter lists is OK, I haven't meticulously watched it for the last two years, but in Covid lockdown boredom, I really went for it and watched all of it, nothing suspicious, just filter gets from the filter list servers.
 
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If you click on an ad on google search while logged into a Gmail/Google account. You will be tracked even if you are on safari.

Sites like amazon, walmart or ticketing websites are all integrated with Google and Meta ad products. Even Youtube has code from other platforms. Instead of tracking users with Cookies (tech term) they have server side integrations.

You are being tracked one way or the other. Safari has blocked cookie based tracking but Google has figured out other ways to do it.

They have switched to email based tracking, the reason why more and more websites ask you to login with your gmail. They convert the email ID into a unique hashed string and share it with each other to track you across the web.
 
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