MT Six Top Security Features in Safari for Mac

MD Wonder how safe your Safari experience is? Read our post to find out more about Safari for Mac’s essential features that make your browsing secure and private.

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Six Best Safari Security Features

Privacy and data protection are Apple’s biggest priorities, and Safari strives to become the Fort Knox for security with each new release. In this article, we’ll go over essential Safari security features and how they are keeping your private data locked away.

Best Safari Security Features

1. Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP)

Your online journey isn’t really as private as you may think. Many advertisers use trackers to follow you all around the web. The ITP feature aims to shield you from all kinds of ad trackers. How does it work? This privacy feature identifies domains that track visitors and prevents them from following the user in the future by wiping the tracking data those domains try to place on the device. ITP is turned on by default, so no need to dive into Safari settings.

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2. Smart Search

The Safari Smart Search field is the address bar at the top of the Safari window where you can type up anything you want to find, such as links, search queries, website names. In a nutshell, Smart Search reduces the amount of data collected about the user by the search engine. With this feature, Safari neither allows the engine to know the user’s location nor sends cookies or search data that follow the user across websites.

Safari Smart Search

Safari usually provides suggestions from the default search engine that helps users find information faster. It can be helpful to have your search auto-completed as you type it up, but it also means giving up your inquiries to the search engine. In Safari, you can disable the automatic prompts in the settings, so the browser won’t share anything with the search engine until you’ve hit Return/Enter.

3. Privacy Reports

The Smart Search field has Privacy Reports, a feature that provides visibility into the websites that track your activity and lets you know if the browser has blocked such websites. You can access this information by going to a website and clicking on the shield icon. It will show you if a current website uses any trackers. For a complete history of blocked trackers within a certain period of time, go to Privacy Report in Safari.

4. Private Browsing

Safari has Private Browsing, a mode that works just like a regular Safari window, except that it doesn’t save a list of visited websites and search queries on the device. Your browsing in a private mode will be a stand-alone experience – no data will be saved or reflected on the rest of your devices. If you want to log in anywhere, you need to enter your login and password, as Private Browsing is basically a clean slate.

It protects your data even more than bare ITP. You can open a private window in Safari by going File – New Private Window. If you want all of your browsing sessions to be private, set up default private Safari windows by clicking Safari – Preferences – General – Safari opens with – A new private window.

5. Clear History

Like all browsers, Safari keeps your search history and data from websites you visited, such as cookies and temporary files (cache). That can be a lot of data. Fortunately, Safari makes it easy to remove history, cookies, and cache in one go – all you need to do is use Clear History in the Safari Settings and choose a timeframe.

This feature lets you wipe history on your current device and other devices sharing the same iCloud account, so make sure to save your critical data. If you wonder how to clear cache in other browsers or do away with other cache types (system cache or app cache), this instruction will help you.

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6. Password management

Our passwords tend to auto-fill when we use them to log in to a website multiple times in many instances. While it’s convenient, it’s also unsafe to have your sensitive data auto-filled, as it may be exposed to prying eyes. If you have Touch ID, you can prevent autofill for your credentials, allowing it only after Touch ID authorization. You can find this feature under Safari – Preferences – Passwords.

Another essential security feature is a list of stolen passwords from Safari. To activate it, you should put a tick in the “Detect passwords compromised by data leaks” box. Compromised passwords will be marked by a yellow triangle, signaling that you need to update that password on a relevant website.

Finally, Safari helps you use potent passwords. The browser creates and suggests a strong password for each new website you want to use, making your web experience even more secure.