As a company that still makes the majority of its money selling hardware, Apple is perhaps less interested in tracking and monetizing your activity than other tech giants. Over the years it has pitched this as a competitive advantage, emphasizing that its products are designed to prioritize privacy. As the company detailed in its pre-taped Worldwide Developers Conference keynote Monday, Apple will double down on data protection in its upcoming iOS 14, macOS Big Sur, and Safari releases.
The improvements largely focus on who can access and share your data, when, and why. After years of increasingly opaque innovations from social networks, marketing firms, and advertisers who all want to track and monetize your online behavior, Apple’s emphasis on transparency could help users take back some control. But even a company as large and moneyed as Apple doesn’t have a panacea for every privacy woe.
Going on Safari
Safari had already established its bona fides as a privacy browser as recently as 2018, when it took a strong stand against ad trackers, chiefly by making it difficult for them to “fingerprint” your device as you browse around the web. In macOS Big Sur, Safari will include a specific “Privacy Report” to break down what specifically Safari is blocking and give you more insight into which trackers are cropping up in your daily browsing.
Additionally, Apple will now support more browser extensions in Safari and make it easier to find them in the Mac App Store. But the company also seems acutely aware of the risk that rogue extensions have posed to other browsers, given the expansive permissions they often receive to access your data and view whatever you’re doing online. So Safari will include granular controls that let you dictate which extensions work on which websites—that way they don’t necessarily all have access to everything all the time.
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