Jul 27

Just Discovered: Apple’s Safari Browser Has a Serious Privacy Leak. How to Fix it Now.

Posted by admin on Tuesday Jul 27, 2010 Under Zocials

If you’re using Safari right now, you could be open to a malicious attack via your autofill feature, which is enabled by default.[1] The autofill feature on the Safari could be letting a malicious site find out your personal details, such as your full name, where you work and live down to the city and state or province, and your email address. It’s a problem disclosed recently (July 21, 2010), so if you’re one of the 83 million users of versions 4 and 5 of Safari, you need to act now![2][3]

Steps

  1. Open your Safari browser. If you have versions 4 or 5, proceed to disable your autofill. (You can check the version by clicking on “Safari” in the browser bar, letting the menu drop down, then clicking on “About Safari”. A box will pop up showing you your current version.)

  2. Staying with the Safari drop-down menu, go to “Preferences”.

  3. Click on the image that says “Autofill”. The autofill box will open out in your browser.

  4. Uncheck the autofill box. In the autofill box, uncheck the box marked “Using info from my Address Book card”.
    Prior to unchecking, still enabled.

    Prior to unchecking, still enabled.

    This is how it should look after unchecking the first line.

    This is how it should look after unchecking the first line.

  5. Click the close button (small red circle upper left hand corner) and you’re done. If you want, check to see that it worked by opening the autofill box one more time. The unchecked box should remain that way.


Tips

  • This autofill feature works even if you have never entered data on any website because it draws the information from your personal record in the local operating system address book.
  • This is an example of the auto-complete feature, which is different from the autofill feature.

    This is an example of the auto-complete feature, which is different from the autofill feature.

    This autofill feature is not the same as the normal auto-complete data feature that remembers your text after typing it into a form.

  • If you have other versions of Safari, it’s probably wise to do this as a precaution, until further information is known.


Warnings

  • It can take mere seconds to lift all of your personal information via this breach in Safari’s browser.


Things You’ll Need

  • Safari browser


Related wikiHows


Sources and Citations


Article Tools

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.