Clingers

Apple launches its newest global privacy campaign, continuing its more than seven-year effort to raise awareness around the value of keeping user data secure and reinforce its longstanding belief that privacy is a fundamental human right.

The campaign highlights how Safari is designed to help keep online trackers off your back in a world where the data economy continues to profit from people’s browsing habits, often without their knowledge or consent. Safari is built to ensure websites keep working as expected while blocking unwanted cross-site tracking. Safari also minimizes the amount of data passed to third parties like search engines, and it provides many other features to help protect privacy like Private Browsing and secure password management. Through both broadcast and digital executions, Apple dramatizes the invisible ecosystem of tracking that follows consumers across the web every day.

“Clingers” is a quirky yet unsettling hero film that brings online data trackers to life as creepy “clingers” dressed in chrome-colored tracksuits who physically latch onto people everywhere they browse. The trackers obsessively follow non-Apple users in increasingly absurd and uncomfortable ways until Safari blocks them. Where other browsers allow trackers to trail users across the internet, Safari is designed to help keep them off your back.

A companion digital execution, “Tracker Invasion,” extends the idea into the online experience itself, designed to make people think about browsing privacy while actively navigating the internet. The clingers appear across digital environments watching users browse from inside the actual digital media units, before Safari blocks them into oblivion. Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and Fingerprint Defense features are designed to help detect and stop hidden trackers while reducing the digital fingerprints advertisers use to follow users across the web. Intelligent Tracking Prevention uses on-device machine learning to block cross-site tracking, while still allowing websites to function normally. And to combat fingerprinting, Safari presents a simplified version of the system configuration to trackers so more devices look identical, making it harder to single one out. Both features are turned on by default so there is no need to make changes in Settings or Safari preferences to benefit from these privacy protections.

“Clingers” will roll out globally across Broadcast, OOH, Digital Display, Social, Cinema, YouTube, and Apple.com beginning June 3, 2026.

The campaign is the latest chapter in Apple’s long-running “Privacy. That’s iPhone” platform, which debuted as a single billboard at CES in 2019 and has since evolved over the years with campaigns like Tracked, Waiting Room and Flock becoming one of the most sustained and recognizable brand platforms in technology. At a time when the data economy increasingly profits from tracking people online, Apple has consistently championed a different approach: designing products and features that prioritize user privacy by default.