Understanding Website Trackers And the New Privacy Report In Safari 14

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at the new privacy report feature in Safari 14.

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So after you upgrade to Safari 14 you're going to see a new button at the top of the screen for Privacy Report. Let's go to a website and you'll see that button come alive. If you click it you'll see a number there. Usually a pretty large number for most websites. The number of trackers prevented from profiling you. You can click here to reveal the list and see a list of all the sites. Sites you've never heard of and sites that certainly aren't the one that you're visiting right now. So let's go to another site. Like say Yahoo. We can click here and see the number for that and a new set of sites. Now you may see some sites that are the same between different pages. In fact if you click the i here you get a full report of the number of trackers stopped in the last thirty days, the percentage of sites that had trackers on them, and lists of websites including all the trackers that have been seen on those websites. Then you can also do the list by trackers and see the sites for each tracker. 

Now the good news is all of these trackers have been prevented from tracking you. That's because in Safari Preferences there's a feature under Privacy, Prevent Cross Site Tracking. As long as you have that turned on that report is actually showing you the trackers that have been stopped. 

So what is a tracker. Well when you're at a site like this one you may think that everything you see here is from that website. So this is yahoo.com and you may think everything here is yahoo.com. But that's not true. There are parts of the page that are from another website. Like this advertisement over here. So the ad is basically a blank rectangle on the webpage and it's filled in by another webpage coming from that advertiser. So any ad you see on a website are not coming from that site. They're just a reserved spot and another site comes in and fills in that space. That's how web advertising works. So you're not just looking at this site. You're not just looking at yahoo.com here. You're actually looking at yahoo.com and, in this case, 14 other sites. These are the 14 other sites that you're also viewing either in rectangles like the ones for ads or at hidden little pieces of code. Those hidden pieces of code are loaded onto the webpage and they are trackers.

Now sometimes trackers do nothing more than actually gather statistics. So the website owner may want to know how many people are visiting that site everyday and a tracker is simply going to be used to count that. So they can see like today 800 people came to their site and tomorrow 900 people came to their site. So traffic is increasing. The tracker will be stored there so it doesn't count you twice. You visit the page once and it counts you as one user and it doesn't count you multiple times during that day. Other trackers though are noting the content of the page. So if you're at a travel page it will note that you are interested in travel. If you're at a page about buying a car it will note that you are interested in buying a car. It will then take this information and use it to serve ads when you're at other pages. So looking at some of these, like for instance double-click.net here, is one of Goggle's ad services and double-click.net is seen on almost every page that serves ads. So if you're looking at a page that has to do with a topic and you go to another website both of them are using double-click.net and the ads can be customized based on the interest you show on topics as you go from website to website. This isn't inherently bad. It doesn't really know who you are or really much about you. It just knows that at one point you were interested in buying a new car or finding a cheap airfare. Now instead of showing you a random ad it's going to show you an ad tailored to those interests. 

Fortunately, thanks to this feature here to prevent cross site tracking in Safari these are prevented. Safari is recognizing that an advertising company is trying to track you from  page to page and it's stopping that. So when you go to a new page you may still see an ad that fits a previous topic to another page that you've viewed. But it won't be because of a tracker like this. Of course if you voluntarily log into a system, like say you're logged into Facebook and you've viewed certain topics on Facebook and then you go to another part of Facebook or a website that uses Facebook in some way and you see an ad well that's going to be able to track you because you've been logged into Facebook that entire time. You're giving your information to that system that you're logged into. That's not a web browser cross site tracker. That's actually a tracker inside of the system you're logged into. 

So while this privacy report is interesting and it does keep websites honest showing you exactly what trackers they are using it's really not something to get alarmed about. Cross site tracking has been around for a long time. Advertisers are always going to try and find ways to customize ads so they don't waste their money. They don't want to show you an ad of a service you're not interested in. On the other hand they want to make sure somebody is interested in their services and those advertisements reach them.   

It's nice to see this prominent feature in Safari to bring attention to internet privacy but there's really no action for you to take other than to have this feature turned on. Although we'll probably have the effect in the future of advertisers and advertising networks using trackers less and less. But it's doubtful this will happen in other browsers outside of Safari and also Firefox as a browser like Chrome is owned by Goggle and Goggle of course has an interest in serving up relevant ads as ads are their primary source of revenue.