HOW TO Change privacy preferences in Safari

1 Access the options

You’ll find Safari’s privacy settings in Safari > Preferences > Privacy. The most important one here is Prevent Cross-Site Tracking, which is the feature that blocks trackers that try to follow you around online.

Get camera shy

Safari also remembers which websites asked for permission to use your camera. You can choose Ask, Deny or Allow for specific sites and set one of the three options as the default permission for all new sites.

Nobble Notifications

That little blue checkbox at the bottom is one of our favourite boxes ever: it stops websites from asking if they can send you notifications, saving you a lot of time you’d otherwise spend clicking ‘No Thanks’ buttons.

Check your cookies

Blocking all cookies is the nuclear option because many online shops and services use them to recognise you. But, if you select Manage Website Data, you can see and get rid of any unwanted cookies living on your Mac.

Mic drop

You can do the same thing with your Mac’s microphone. So, for example, if you don’t want any sites to access your Mac’s mic then set the When Visiting Other Websites drop-down to Deny. Once again, you can revoke permission any time.

Prevent pop-ups

Some pop-up windows are necessary — but most aren’t. If you set the default here to Block and Notify you’ll see a little icon in the Address Bar whenever a popup is blocked. Clicking it will allow the window or tab to open.

Control specific sites

The next tab to look at is Websites. If you’ve installed a content blocker extension (see page 79), you can enable and disable it for specific websites here. That means you can choose to see ads on sites you support.

Hide yourself

Location awareness can be useful sometimes, for example if you’re using a store finder on a retailer’s website. But it can also be used to share information about you — you can control that on a per-site basis here too.

Use the Develop menu

Some sites do weird things in Safari, often resulting in the page refusing to load properly. Enabling the develop menu (in Preferences > Advanced) can fix that: we often disable JavaScript to get a smoother online experience.