Google Didn’t ‘Track’ iPhones, but It Did Bypass Safari’s Privacy Settings

Danny Sullivan has a good summary of last week’s WSJ story about Google circumventing Safari’s default setting to disallow third-party browser cookies. (I’m pretty sure he’s wrong that Mobile Safari defaults to disallowing all cookies, though.) Bottom line: the Journal story sensationalized what Google was doing, but Google still doesn’t come out of this looking good.

Update: I just double-checked on an iPhone restored to factory settings, and Safari’s “Accept cookies” preference defaults to “From visited”.

★ Monday, 20 February 2012