Apple announced a slew of new software features at its Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday[1], including an augmented reality upgrade and animojis that can stick out their tongues when you do. But the company's latest desktop and mobile operating systems contain a more subtle, yet more radical, innovation. The newest version of Apple's Safari browser will push back hard against the ad-tracking methods and device fingerprinting techniques that marketers and data brokers use to monitor web users as they browse. Starting with Facebook.
The next version of Safari will explicitly prompt you when a website tries to access your cookies or other data, and let you decide whether to allow it, a welcome step toward explicit choices about online tracking. Safari will also make a dent in defeating the so-called "fingerprinting" approach, in which marketers use publicly accessible information about devices—like the way they're configured, the fonts they have installed, and the plug-ins they run—to assign them an individual, trackable ID. In macOS Mojave and iOS 12, Safari will scrub much of this data, exposing only generic configuration information and default fonts. The browser will also stop supporting legacy plugins. The idea is to make your Mac indistinguishable from millions of others, muting the fingerprinting effect.
"Data companies are clever and relentless," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said on Monday, explaining why Apple pushed to add these features. The company calls the set of tools "Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0," and they feature WebKit changes[2], like eliminating a 24-hour grace period that gave trackers a day of cookie access.
'The real test will be how well it works and how advertisers and trackers will react.'
Will Strafach, Sudo Security Group
The new version of Safari will also help improve password