Apple’s Webkit to launch new privacy feature
- by Winnifred-Dmonte
- May 27, 2019 12:03
According to the reports, On Wednesday, Apple Inc. said that its browser engine Webkit will launch a new technology to track advertising clicks and whether they lead to a product purchase while preserving the privacy of users. John Wilander writes via the Webkit Blog: We are presenting a new technology to allow attribution of ad clicks on the web while preserving user privacy. Apple’s step shows how increased public scrutiny is forcing greater transparency in Silicon Valley, particularly as its tech rivals Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc’s Google have struggled with data privacy scandals.
The new technology from Webkit avoids placing any trust in any of the parties, whether it be the network or the merchant, and limits communication between them to prevent sharing of data that could track an individual user. John Wilander states, “This technology is designed to preserve user’s privacy. Users should not be uniquely identified across websites for the purposes of ad click attribution. Only websites that users visit should be involved in measuring ad clicks and conversions. The browser should act on behalf of the user and do its best to preserve privacy while reporting on ad click attribution. The browser vendor should not learn about the user’s ad clicks or conversions.
Considering all these principles we have designed this new technology”. Wilander also added, “Critically, our solution avoids placing trust in any of the parties involved – the ad network, the merchant, or any other intermediaries and dramatically limit the entropy of data passed between them to prevent the communication of a tracking identifier. Needless to say, tracking pixels that carry cookies enabled sites such as search.example to build up a huge profile of people’s interests, purchasing power, habits, age, etc. We refer to this as cross-site tracking and Safari prevents it from happening through the Webkit feature Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP)”. Earlier this month, Google said it will roll out a dashboard-like function in its Chrome browser to offer users more control in fending off tracking cookies, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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