Apple moves further down the road of removing Do Not Track from Safari

February 6, 2019 TH Author

Oh sweet irony. A little respected privacy setting asking advertisers and sites to not track users can be used as a fingerprinting mechanism, Apple has said, and will thus be removed from its Safari web browser.

The change was noted in the release notes for Safari Technology Preview 75, posted on Wednesday.

Since Do Not Track’s inception, it has been labelled as a great idea in theory, but abysmal in practice.

In a post this week, search engine DuckDuckGo said around 23 percent of survey respondents in the United States had turned the setting on. On its site, the search engine said the number was 24.4 percent.

Almost half of the respondents did not realise Do Not Track was merely a request to not be tracked.

“It can be alarming to realize that Do Not Track is about as foolproof as putting a sign on your front lawn that says ‘Please, don’t look into my house’ while all of your blinds remain open,” DuckDuckGo said.

“In fact, most major tech companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter, do not respect the Do Not Track setting when you visit and use their sites.”

The search engine said 72 percent of respondents backed a level of federal regulation that requires companies to respect the setting.

Last week, it was noted Safari engineers were working on limiting the amount of Javascript a site could load.

Related Coverage

Safari engineers look at different approach to fighting intrusive ads

Safari engineers want to limit the amount of JavaScript that a website can load.

Firefox to block auto-playing audio starting March 2019

Firefox 66 for desktop and mobile will block auto-playing sound, Mozilla announced today.

Apple killing off web passwords? Safari trials WebAuthn logins on macOS

Safari could join Firefox, Chrome, and Edge support for Web Authentication.

Firefox to get a ‘site isolation’ feature, similar to Chrome

Mozilla announces Project Fission, a project to add true multi-process support to Firefox.

How to use a password manager on your iPhone or iPad (TechRepublic)

You can use a password manager on your iOS device to easily sign into secure websites and mobile apps. Learn how to do so in iOS 12.