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iOS 14 Safari – Protect your browsing with Privacy Report

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Apple has always been a stickler for privacy. To that end, Safari in iOS 14 recently gained a powerful new feature called Privacy Report.

Let’s run through what Privacy Report is, and how you can check it to be assured that Apple is protecting your information when browsing the internet on your iPhone or iPad.

What is Privacy Report?

Previous versions of Safari have introduced the ability to prevent websites from tracking your cookies, which means that advertisers and data collection companies can no longer build a picture of your browsing habits.

In iOS 14, Privacy Report shows you precisely how many and which websites have attempted to track you, as well as the precise identity of the trackers that Safari has blocked during your browsing sessions.

How does Safari block trackers?

Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention employs on-device machine learning to pick out trackers and stop them from accessing your browsing data. It also uses the privacy-focused web search engine DuckDuckGo to independently identify known trackers.

How do I access Privacy Report?

It’s very simple to obtain a report of the work Safari has been doing behind the scenes to keep your browsing data protected.

Just open Safari and tap the Aa icon at the top left. Then, select Privacy Report at the bottom of the list.

How do I use Privacy Report?

At the top of your Privacy Report, you’ll see the number of trackers prevented from profiling you and the percentage of websites that attempted to contact trackers.

Scroll down, and you’ll see the number of trackers contacted by the current website, followed by a list of the websites with the most trackers contacted. Tap on any of these websites for a breakdown of the trackers that have been prevented from profiling you.

Tap the Trackers tab, and this view will switch to show you the trackers most commonly contacted by the websites you’ve used. Tap any of these for a rundown of those websites.

Alternative privacy tools for iOS

We’ve already mentioned DuckDuckGo as a privacy tool that’s used by Safari, but it also exists as a free stand-alone web browser on the App Store. We’ve long recommended it as the best web browser for the privacy-conscious.

If you’re particularly wedded to Safari, there’s always 1Blocker. It’s a particularly fastidious content blocker extension that, once downloaded, lives within Safari, but supplies a much broader range of ‘rules’ to filter out even more unwanted attention from nosy websites.