Apple Beats Google to New Privacy Measure, Totally Phases out Third-party cookies in its Latest Safari Update

Apple has released a major update for its Safari browser. In this new update, Apple upgraded its privacy feature, the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), to block all third-party cookies on the web browser.

According to John Wilander, Apple’s WebKit engineer and the man behind ITP, Safari now blocks all third-party cookies often used by advertisers to track your web activities.

This update takes several important steps to fight cross-site tracking and make it more safe to browse the web. First of all, it paves the way. We will report on our experiences of full third-party cookie blocking to the privacy groups in W3C to help other browsers take the leap.

— John Wilander 🇺🇦 (@johnwilander) March 24, 2020

Apple Beats Google to blocking third-party cookies

The phasing out of third-party cookies in the latest Safari update comes ahead of Google’s plan to also start phasing them out. Google also plans to totally phase out cookies in 2022.

Suggested reads: Why Google Dropping Third Party Cookies Improves Your Privacy Protection

The phasing out of third-party cookies comes as a significant milestone in the fight to increase web privacy. With the new privacy updates, no advertiser or website is able to track Apple web users around the internet using the commonplace tracking technology by default.

In addition to blocking third-party cookies by default, The latest update to the ITP also safeguards against trackers using the very nature of tracking prevention as a way to keep tabs on users.

“Full third-party cookie blocking makes sure there’s no ITP state that can be detected through cookie blocking behavior. We’d like to again thank Google for initiating this analysis through their report,”

John Wilander, Apple’s WebKit engineer behind ITP

Speaking on the update, Wilander thanked Google for helping Apple to improve its ITP. According to him, Google’s research published earlier this year on ITP revealed the possibility of using some elements of it like a fingerprint.

Apple first launched the ITP privacy feature in Safari in 2018. The feature then helped Safari users both on mobile and desktop block some, but not all, cookies.

However, with the latest update, Safari users on Apple phones and Mac now have stronger security to protect their web privacy.