Apple upgrades Safari's tracking prevention features by limiting both “fingerprinting” of devices and user tracking through comment, share, and like buttons
- Users will have to “opt-in” to allowing websites to track their browsing behavior on Safari, including sites with a …
Context & Ripple Effects
This upgrade extends the Intelligent Tracking Prevention Apple introduced in 2017 — a feature ad groups criticized at launch for blocking re-targeting while allowing cookies from visited sites. The new move goes further: rather than just curbing cookies, Safari now requires an explicit opt-in before any site can track browsing behavior, including through embedded comment, share, and like buttons.
The timing matters because it lands alongside Apple's broader WWDC push against Facebook on tracking and social-media habits, positioning the browser itself as the enforcement point for privacy rather than leaving it to regulators or platforms.
First-order effects
- Facebook and other social platforms lose passive data collection from their share and like buttons embedded across the web, since Safari users must now affirmatively opt in to be tracked.
- Ad-tech firms relying on device fingerprinting — which sidestepped cookie blocks — face a direct technical countermeasure in one of the world's major browsers.
Second-order effects
- Google faces pressure to match Safari's restrictions in Chrome; per the related coverage, it later committed to fully blocking third-party cookies there, a trajectory this announcement helped force.
- Publishers and advertisers must shift toward consent-based measurement, since fingerprinting workarounds are no longer reliable against a browser vendor willing to close them.
Third-order effects
- Browser vendors consolidate into de facto privacy regulators, with Apple's WebKit codifying the approach in its strict anti-tracking policy and default cookie blocking arriving in 2020 — standards set by engine maintainers rather than legislatures.
- The web advertising stack structurally reorients around explicit user consent, disadvantaging cross-site trackers and favoring first-party data held by the sites users visit directly.
The trend: Browsers are becoming the primary enforcement layer for web privacy, with each Safari release ratcheting defaults from partial blocking toward full opt-in consent and pushing Chrome and the ad industry to follow.