The headlines on many tech-watching sites this week amounted to one big whaaat? An anti-tracking feature in Apple's Safari browser was actually exposing private browsing habits, according to researchers outside Apple. This was all about the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) implemented by Apple's Safari browser. The Intelligent Tracking Prevention tool became available in 2017. Ivan Mehta in TNW expanded: "In 2017, Apple rolled out its ITP technology, one of the most highly regarded privacy protection kits for the web around the world. The system clears out first-party cookies regularly and blocks third-party cookies by default, making it difficult for advertisers to track users."

The head-scratching grew more intense. The researcher team from Google told Apple about the problem with some flaws back in August 2019 and in December an Apple blog post said browser issues were addressed. An Apple engineer said in the blog WebKit in December that the matter had been addressed—the news was encouraging to any user worried about tracking fallouts. Apple had produced a fix and said thank you to Google. But researchers at Google raised issues still. Financial Times had a much quoted story, and other news gatherers also talked about, a published paper by Google researchers that found problems, and the paper was published on Jan. 21. "Information Leaks via Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention" is the title of the Google report; the authors were Artur Janc, Krzysztof Kotowicz, Lukas Weichselbaum and Roberto Clapis. Their focus still is the tool that Apple offered to counter web tracking. Actually, according to the Google team's report on this, the Information Security Engineering team at Google first learned about the flaws just during "a routine security review."

That is when they found security and privacy issues in Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention design. In the Google report, they wrote: "The authors of this report believe strongly in improving the privacy posture of the web and applaud Safari developers' ongoing efforts in this area. At the same time we would like to note that all changes to the web platform that affect its fundamental security properties (such as modifying the behavior of cross-site resource fetches) carry the risk of compromising user privacy and/or security unless special care is taken to understand their impact on the platform. We look forward to collaborating with Apple on future security and privacy improvements to the web."

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