Are burner wallets on iOS now a thing of the past?

• Thanks to new changes to Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in iOS, burner wallets may have been killed off for users on the iPhone. 
• Burner wallets or non-custodial wallets that store’s private keys for users in the browser's local storage.

Thanks to new changes to Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in iOS, burner wallets may have been killed off for users on the iPhone. 

For those that don’t know, burner wallets or non-custodial wallets that store’s private keys for users in the browser's local storage. Due to a change by Apple though, it’s meant that user privacy could be the downfall of this model.

Thanks to this new change, the expiry of client side cookies will be capped to 7 days. Furthermore, this indicates that these kinds of wallets will be destroyed after such a period of time. However, even though these wallets were never intended for long-term storage of digital assets such as bitcoin, there are many users out there that choose not to follow such a rule.

Despite all of this, there is one exception to the change. In the blog post that announced the new update, it states the following:

“The seven-day cap on script-writable storage is gated on ‘after seven days of Safari use without user interaction on the site’. That is the case in Safari. Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. Their days of use will match actual use of the web application which resets the timer. We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted.”

However, it is no easy task to include a burner wallet to the home screen. One for my software engineer at Google, David Mihal has said the following looking into such changes:

“Unfortunately, there’s no ‘easy’ way to prompt a user to add a website to their home screen, users must find the button hidden inside Safari’s ‘share’ panel. Future Burner Wallets will likely display warnings to Safari users, prompting them to add the wallet to the home screen & secure their funds.”

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. For more news on this, Crypto Trackers and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!