Summary
Apple added new privacy protections to Private Browsing in Safari 17.0 and 17.2. Apple believes that users should not be tracked across the web without their knowledge or their consent. New protections include blocking network loads of known trackers and blocking ad-tracking.
The new Privacy Protection option is available in the latest version of Apple’s iOS 8 software. The new Privacy protection option is also available in Apple ’S Safari software. It allows users to opt out of the Privacy Protection feature by clicking a button.
Safari 17.0 adds the following protections for all users: Encrypted DNS queries are used to resolve server hostnames into IP addresses, which is a necessary function of accessing the internet. Private Browsing uses Oblivious DNS over HTTPS by default, which encrypts and proxies DNS queries to protect the privacy and integrity of these lookups.
Fingerprinting is the process of creating a unique identifier for each user. The unique identifier can be used to track a user's location, or to make it easier to find them. It can also be used as part of a user’s profile to show that they are in a certain location.
We view cross-site tracking and per-site user recall as privacy problems to be addressed by browsers. This could mean altering the APIs, gating them behind user permissions, or not implementing them. With Safari’s advanced fingerprinting protections enabled, Safari applies tiny amounts of noise to pixels on the canvas.
In Safari 17.5, we made audio noise injection more robust in the following ways. Instead of using a uniform distribution for the injected noise, we now use normally-distributed noise. We’ve refactored the noise injection mechanism to support arbitrary levels of noise injection.
The intent of the API is to help advertisers target users with ads based on each user’s interests. The user doesn’t get told upfront which topics Chrome has tagged them with or which topics it exposes to which parties. It all happens in the background and by default.
Privacy Enhancements in Both Browsing Modes are enabled by default in both regular browsing and Private Browser. In Safari 17.2, cross-site Blob URLs are partitioned by first-party web sites. When a tab in Safari is closed, all of the session storage associated with it is destroyed.
