steven36 Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 (Reuters) - Google researchers have found multiple security flaws in Apple Inc’s Safari web browser that allowed the tracking of users’ browsing behavior, Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing a soon-to-be published paper. The vulnerabilities were found in a tool specifically designed to protect privacy and could have allowed third parties to obtain “sensitive” information about the browsing habits of users, the report added. Google disclosed the flaws to Apple last August, according to the report. Apple and Alphabet Inc’s Google did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. Source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 22, 2020 Share Posted January 22, 2020 Who would use Safari anyway, while there's a lot of alternatives better than that? Like Google Chrome, Brave, Opera or even newly released Microsoft Edge? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steven36 Posted January 22, 2020 Author Share Posted January 22, 2020 35 minutes ago, Edward Raja said: Who would use Safari anyway, while there's a lot of alternatives better than that? Like Google Chrome, Brave, Opera or even newly released Microsoft Edge? On IOS there is no real Chromium engine or Gecko engine All browsers on IOS use the WebKit engine so there just Safari with a different skin. You got to love it when Desktop /Android users talk about browsers in the Apple ecosystem because most don't have a clue. The browsers you name are not even the same on IOS as they are on other platforms. Apple want allow Chromium on there mobile platform and in some countries IOS is used more than Android and Windows. Apple also has were you can restrict data being harvested form 3rd party apps but not so much there own data harvesting is blocked. Apple also want let you set 3rd party browsers as default on IOS so stuff still going to open in it , also even if they did it would not be the same experience as using Chrome on Desktop or Android. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steven36 Posted January 22, 2020 Author Share Posted January 22, 2020 Google researchers discovered multiple security flaws in Apple's Safari web browser that let users' browsing habits be tracked despite Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature. Google plans to publish details on the security flaws in the near future, and a preview of Google's discovery was seen by Financial Times, with the publication sharing information on the vulnerabilities this morning. The security flaws were first found by Google in the summer of 2019, and were disclosed to Apple in August. There were five types of potential attacks that could allow third parties to learn "sensitive private information about the user's browsing habits." Google researchers say that Safari left personal data exposed because the Intelligent Tracking Prevention List "implicitly stores information about the websites visited by the user." Malicious entities could use these flaws to create a "persistent fingerprint" that would follow a user around the web or see what individual users were searching for on search engine pages. Intelligent Tracking Prevention, which Apple began implementing in 2017, is a privacy-focused feature meant to make it harder for sites to track users across the web, preventing browsing profiles and histories from being created. Lukasz Olejnik, a security researcher who saw Google's paper, said that if exploited, the vulnerabilities "would allow unsanctioned and uncontrollable user tracking." Olejnik said that such privacy vulnerabilities are rare, and "issues in mechanisms designed to improve privacy are unexpected and highly counter-intuitive." Apple appears to have addressed these Safari security flaws in a December update, based on a release update that thanked Google for its "responsible disclosure practice," though full security credit has not yet been provided by Apple so there's a chance that there's still some behind-the-scenes fixing to be done. Source Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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