How to check the Privacy Report for website tracking in Safari
Quick… how prevalent are trackers on the websites you visit? You know? Do you want to know it? If you use the Safari browser on macOS, you have everything you need to view this information built right into the browser. The tool in question is called Privacy Report and it is easy to access and use. With the privacy report, you can see the reported domains as well as the websites you’ve been tracking from those domains.
The information Safari collects will be a real eye-opener for many users who probably had no idea how widespread trackers are. With this information, you might be inclined to either stop visiting a website or to ensure that the website cannot be tracked.
The good news is that Safari is pretty good at blocking trackers. But when you have this information at your fingertips, you can make informed decisions about how to approach your online behavior.
Likewise: How to get more space in Safari with Compact Layout
There are two ways to view this information – on a site-by-site basis or from an all-encompassing dashboard. I’ll show you how to do both. What you end up doing with the information is entirely up to you. On more than a few occasions I’ve stopped looking at websites that used an excessive amount of trackers (regardless of whether they were blocked or not).
With that in mind, how do you view the Safari privacy report? Let’s dive in and find out. I’m demonstrating Safari 15.6.1 on a MacBook Pro running macOS Monterey.
How to view privacy report per site
1. Open a website
Open Safari and navigate to a website you visit frequently.
2. Open the privacy report
Click the shield icon just to the left of the Safari address bar (illustration 1).
Illustration 1: Access the privacy report in Safari via the shield icon.
Image: Jack Wallen
Click Trackers on this website (figure 2).
Figure 2: I’m about to take a look at the number of trackers Safari has blocked on Facebook. Image: Jack Wallen
Once you expand the entry, you should see the list of trackers blocked by Safari. To be honest I was surprised how few Safari caught. And after a quick update, Safari didn’t find any new trackers, leading me to believe the web browser is doing its job.
Next, let’s take a look at the privacy report for all websites.
How to view the Global Privacy Report
1. Open the Privacy Report popup
As with opening the per-site report, click the shield icon. This time, however, click the circled “i” in the upper-left corner of the pop-up to view the global privacy report (figure 3).
figure 3: The global privacy report shows all the tracker information you need. Image: Jack Wallen
If you expand any of the entries on the Websites tab, you will see a list of all trackers blocked by Safari (figure 4).
figure 4: Safari blocked 44 trackers on wdrb.com. Image: Jack Wallen
The Trackers tab provides an even more detailed look at the trackers Safari has blocked (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Safari has blocked a significant number of trackers. Image: Jack Wallen
What can you do with this information?
The Safari Privacy Report is a tool that gives you information; There is no way to take action. The reason is that the web browser has already become active by blocking the trackers. What you see is the result of Safari’s work.
However, as I said, you can use this information to make informed decisions about the websites you visit. Even if Safari blocks a tracker, it doesn’t mean that the tracker has stopped doing its job.
For example, Safari blocked branch.io and google-analytics.com from following me on Twitter, but they keep trying (and failing…thanks to Safari). But now that I know Twitter is trying to put these trackers on me, if I’m concerned I could choose to stop visiting the site or use a web browser for Twitter that blocks trackers even more aggressively (like Firefox with his Custom Option for Advanced Tracker Protection).
Trusting websites these days can be dangerous. You should find out what is happening with the websites you visit so that we can better protect you and your privacy.