Cookies are useful for the internet because it helps websites know who we are, if we’ve already logged in, and so on. Unfortunately, over the years, cookies have gained a bad reputation for being used for tracking users across websites, meaning that over time, websites and companies will learn more about you and your activities, and can thus create extremely targeted ads.
The good news is that if you’re a Safari user on either iOS or macOS, Apple has introduced an update to Safari in macOS 10.15.4 and iOS 13.4, in which the latest update will now allow Safari to fully block third-party cookies.
According to Apple, “It might seem like a bigger change than it is. But we’ve added so many restrictions to ITP since its initial release in 2017 that we are now at a place where most third-party cookies are already blocked in Safari.” Apple had actually introduced cookie blocking in Safari back in 2017, but it seems that these changes will make the browser’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention even better.
This is because of the removal of “statefulness” and also how attackers can no longer see Intelligent Tracking Prevention’s status. Apple boasts that Safari is the first mainstream browser to fully block third-party cookies by default, but we wouldn’t be surprised if eventually other browsers were to introduce similar features as well.
Filed in . Read more about Apps, iOS, macOS, Privacy and Safari. Source: webkit.org