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By 5 June 2018 | Categories: news

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Facebook and Apple are not always the best of friends. The latest bit of argy-bargy comes straight from Apple’s Developer Conference, where the company’s software chief Craig Federighi briefly used his time on stage to talk about how Facebook tracks your internet usage.

We've all seen these - these like buttons, and share buttons and these comment fields. Well, it turns out these can be used to track you, whether you click on them or not," he said, pointing towards a big screen with certain Facebook tools highlighted.

Federighi then went on to state that in future, Apple’s Safari web browser will open up a notification stating, "Do you want to allow Facebook.com to use cookies and available data while browsing?"

Whether this prompt will appear every time Safari comes across a Facebook monitoring tool, or if permission only needs to be denied once for it to be effective across the browsing experience, is not known yet.


The BBC quotes security expert, Kevin Beaumont, noting that this is actually a big move for Apple. "Quite often the changes companies make around privacy are small, incremental, they don't shake the market up much. Here Apple is allowing users to see when tracking is enabled on a website - actually being able to visually see that with a prompt is breaking new ground," Beaumont states.

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