What Is Intelligent Tracking Prevention?

Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) is Apple Safari's built-in privacy feature that restricts cross-site tracking by limiting how long cookies persist and blocking known trackers by default. It affects the accuracy of tags and analytics platforms that rely on persistent cookies to identify returning visitors.

ITP is often confused with consent-based restrictions, but it applies regardless of what a visitor consents to, simply because they’re using Safari. A tag or analytics setup that looks broken in Safari specifically isn’t necessarily a consent or CMP problem; it may be ITP capping cookie lifespan or blocking a tracker outright. Teams often mistake ITP-driven data gaps for Data Layer errors, when the two require entirely different fixes. Because Apple’s Safari and WebKit dominate mobile browsing to a degree they don’t on desktop, ITP’s impact skews heavily toward mobile data specifically, making it easy to underestimate if a team is only checking desktop numbers.