Apple came up with a better way to mine your personal data through its Safari browser.

They introduced a feature (Intelligent Tracking Protection - ITP) that they claim blocks ads / trackers from tracking you online on the various sites that you visit.

A simplistic explanation:

Every time you visit a website with an ad or a tracker, it leaves a cookie on your browser that identifies you. You could block many of them by telling your browser to block cookies from third-party domains. This coupled with ad blockers is one effective way to tackle online tracking.

What Apple did was to deliberately take away this control from us and ask us to trust them to deicide which cookie is allowed and which is not.

They REMOVED the feature to allow us to block third-party cookies. So now you have only 2 option in Safari - allow ALL cookies or block all cookies. You cannot block all cookies as it breaks nearly all websites. Apple claims that you should allow websites to set cookies so it can research and find out which cookies track you. And so every time you visit a website, and it sets a cookie, Apple collects this information "anonymously".

So in effect, this "privacy feature" is designed to let Apple know about every website you visit.

Ofcourse, Apple claims all this data is anonymously stored (i.e. not tied to any of your personal information like Apple id). (This idea of anonymous collection of data has already been debunked and proven false as it can be "deanonymised").

Second, Apple claims that its anti-tracking feature will not work in private browsing mode because private browsing mode doesn't save cookies once you close a tab. So in effect, Apple deliberately cripples private browsing mode, in effect, advocating that all its users use normal browsing mode (so that Apple, and others, can mine more data from its users)

Third, by taking away cookie control, Apple now is in full control of deciding which cookie can stay in the browser. This means that if you visit a website regularly, Apple will decide how its cookies should be treated, regardless of whether you want it deleted it or not.

All in all, Apples anti-tracking feature is just designed to give their competitors a harder time while giving Apple the ability to mine their users data better and also taking control away from them.

Google researchers also found that Safari's anti-tracking feature was broken and quite weak:

> ... According to the Google researchers, the vulnerabilities left personal data exposed “because the ITP list implicitly stores information about the websites visited by the user”.

> ... The researchers also identified a flaw that allowed hackers to “create a persistent fingerprint that will follow the user around the web”, while others were able to reveal what individual users were searching for on search engine pages.

Apple claims to have fixed this. But the fact remains that the feature is still not quite effective because most online trackers have moved on to browser finger printing.

The developer of the popular ad-blocker uBlock Origin has also stated that Safari / webkit ad-blocking abilities leave a lot to be desired.

Source:

- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jul/23/anonymise...

- https://www.fastcompany.com/90278465/sorry-your-data-can-sti...

- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/health/data-privacy-prote...

- https://www.ft.com/content/916a766a-3d27-11ea-a01a-bae547046...

- https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/22/apple_intelligent_t...

- https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari/issues/158