Ios

(N.B. The next installment in my obsessional interest in thwarting surveillance capitalism. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s seminal work on the subject and you’ll see.)

Justification

Last week I outlined my evolving comprehensive approach to thwarting surveillance capitalism - that is the extraction, repurposing and selling of online behavioural surplus for the purposes of altering future behaviour.

This is a simple iOS shortcut to the embedded Safari setting for clearing Safari history and website data. It turns out that when iOS Safari is presented with a URL in a certain format, it will execute preference settings on the device. After a little trial and error, I noted that the setting Settings → Safari → Clear History and Website Data has its own URL: prefs:root=SAFARI&path=prefs:root=SAFARI&path=CLEAR_HISTORY_AND_DATA. By loading that URL through an iOS Shortcut, you can quickly sanitize iOS Safari.