Bot Review: Safari’s Anti-Tracking Feature Leads to Increased Security Questions | News

Apple advertises with particular attention to security and data protection. Over the years, the group has added many functions to its systems that are intended to put the excessive data collection of website providers and advertising networks in its place. Some of this can be found in the preinstalled Safari browser: There are some functions to increase privacy in the “Security” and “Privacy” settings. One of them, according to browser extension developer Jeff Johnson’s discovery, is that Safari users are constantly being harassed by security checks.

The feature is called “Prevent cross-website tracking” and is enabled by default; On the iPhone, the function can be found under Settings/Apps/Safari, but is called “Prevent cross-site tracking”. Johnson found that Safari triggers a security check every time on websites served via Cloudflare – but only if tracking protection is active.

Global tracking protection is active by default.

Only on Safari
Most of the time, Cloudflare verification shows a waiting animation for several seconds; The user must then tick the “Confirm that you are human” checkbox. Then it takes another nerve-wracking few seconds for content to appear; sometimes you also have to identify certain objects in a number of images. A test page reveals that this happens every time – but only with Safari: Firefox and Chrome also have tracking protection functions, but these do not trigger this query in every case.

Situation in Safari beta even worse
Johnson is the developer behind the StopTheMadness Pro extension. He has submitted a bug report and believes Apple is responsible for fixing this error. Users can currently only fix the annoying behavior by deactivating the anti-tracking function. He also reports that the problem was even worsened in the developer preview Safari Technology Preview. As soon as a user has additionally activated any browser extension, Safari (or Cloudflare) prevents the query from being successfully completed.