Privacy Report

In this video, we’re going to take a look at the new Privacy Report in Safari on the iPhone. This was introduced with iOS 14. Let’s take a look at Safari’s new Privacy Report. Let’s go to my iPhone.

Now, as you probably know, websites use trackers to profile you. As an example, I do have a couple of trackers on my site. This is so I can see where people come from when they visit my site. But I just have a couple of them. There are websites out there that will have several dozen trackers, and all of these trackers are profiling you. Basically, they’re just following you around to see where you are going, and then they can serve ads to try to sell you something, as an example.

Well, now with iOS 14, Safari will block a lot of these trackers, and we can see which trackers are being blocked on which website. To view our Privacy Report, the first thing we need to do is we need to open up Safari, and then we go to a specific website.

So I am at NPR here. I want to see which trackers Safari has blocked from profiling on me that NPR is using. To do that, we go up to the double A’s in the upper left-hand corner, where our address bar is, and then you’re going to see Privacy Report. It’s already telling me that there are 11 trackers on the site, and it prevented those 11 trackers from tracking me. Let’s go to CNN. I tap in here, and I just type in CNN. And again, to see our Privacy Report, we just go up to the double A’s, and you’re going to see that CNN has 31 trackers, or at least what I should say is Safari prevented 31 trackers from tracking me.

We do have more information. When I tap on this, what I’m able to do is see how many trackers Safari has prevented from following me over the last 30 days. So in the last 30 days, there have been a hundred trackers that have been prevented from profiling me. Seventy-five percent of the websites that I contacted had trackers. Do you want to see which websites had trackers? You go over to websites here. If you want to see the trackers? You go over to trackers. And then if you want to see which websites use a specific tracker? You tap on this, and now you can see which website is used for that tracker.

So that’s the new Privacy Report we have with Safari. Basically would the privacy report, Apple is telling you which trackers were prevented from profiling you. We can see which websites had a specific tracker, and then we can also see what trackers each website has. And then we also get a little report showing us how many trackers were prevented from profiling us over the last 30 days. To view the Privacy Report, we just go up to the double A’s in the upper left-hand corner, tap on it, and then Privacy Report.

So that’s the new Privacy Report we have in Safari on the iPhone.