Filipe Espósito, 9to5Mac:

> Safari remains the second most-used desktop web browser in the world as of January 2022, but two of its competitors are close to taking over second place this time around.
>
> While Safari is used by 9.84% of desktop users, Microsoft Edge is right behind with 9.54% market share. Firefox, which had only 8.1% share in January 2021, has gained new users during the past few months and now has 9.18% of the desktop market share. Unsurprisingly, Google Chrome is still in first place with 65.38% of the share.

And:

> While StatCounter or even Apple doesn’t provide details on the reason why Safari is losing users, we can easily make a few assumptions about it. Safari is the default web browser for Apple devices such as the iPhone and the Mac, which certainly contributes to it being the second most used web browser worldwide.
>
> Last year, Apple introduced a completely redesigned version of Safari that unified the address bar with the tab bar. However, the update left some users unhappy, which made Apple revert Safari back to its old design and make the new interface optional for users. This, of course, wasn’t enough to stop many users from switching to other web browsers.

Not sure how big a deal this is. If you look at the StatCounter chart embedded in the 9to5Mac post, the lines are pretty flat. Chrome absolutely dominates, and the rest of the players, including Safari, sit way down in the mix. If I did not read the article and just looked at the chart, I’d say any movement is negligible, in the noise.

Personally, I trust Safari more than other web browsers, both with privacy and with behaving properly in the macOS ecosystem (just search for “chrome Mac battery drain” for one example). Safari is not perfect, obviously, but it works really well for me.

Fabian Braunlein, Positive Security (via AppleInsider):

> Recently, reports about AirTags being used to track other people and their belongings were becoming much more frequent.
>
> In one exemplary stalking case, a fashion and fitness model discovered an AirTag in her coat pocket after having received a tracking warning notification from her iPhone. Other times, AirTags were placed in expensive cars or motorbikes to track them from parking spots to their owner’s home, where they were then stolen.

Lots of press on this issue, and this response from Apple, titled An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking, wherein Apple lays out their work with safety groups and law enforcement agencies to “update AirTag safety warnings and help guard against further unwanted tracking.”

Back to Fabian’s headline linked blog post:

> I might be slightly more familiar with AirTags than the average hacker (having designed and implemented a communication protocol on top of Find My for arbitrary data transmission), but even so I was quite surprised, that when reading Apple’s statement I was able to immediately devise quite obvious bypass ideas for every current and upcoming protection measure mentioned in that relatively long list.
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> The following section will discuss each anti-stalking feature and how it can be bypassed in theory. Thereafter I will describe how I implemented those ideas to build a stealth AirTag and successfully tracked an iPhone user (with their consent of course) for over 5 days without triggering a tracking notification.

There’s a market for stalking devices. Apple did not invent the concept. But consider:

> Apple needs to incorporate non-genuine AirTags into their threat model, thus implementing security and anti-stalking features into the Find My protocol and ecosystem instead of in the AirTag itself, which can run modified firmware or not be an AirTag at all (Apple devices currently have no way to distinguish genuine AirTags from clones via Bluetooth).

Hoping the AirTag team digs into this post.