If you regularly use Apple’s Safari browser, you are probably familiar with your “Fraudulent website warning,” what warns you if the site you are about to visit can be, say, one elaborate phishing scam. What you probably didn’t know is that, until now, this security feature relied on an obscure Google database to work. Now, as part of the privacy features coming soon in iOS 14, it seems that Apple is breaking these ties entirely.
MacRumors was the first to notice some images of iOS 14.5 beta being replaced by Reddit what show clearly Apple uses its own servers as an intermediary between your phone and Google’s databases. As per the original poster displayed, it appears that any web traffic on Safari stops at a new URL – “proxy.safebrowsing.apple” – before entering the Google service.
In short, the “Google Safe Browsing“Databases are essentially a list of sites that are known to be fraudulent or insecure in some way that Google constantly updates by crawling the web. Non-Google applications – like, say, Safari – can hook to Google’s servers and receive a hashed or hashed list of prefixes from these fraudulent sites. In doing so, any clicks will instinctively ping Google’s servers to see if the web address being visited matches any of the names in this list. If they do, a warning flag will be displayed.
The problem here is that Google is, well, Google, and Apple has made a solid effort to put data and privacy protection in the center iOS 14 updates. Pinging Google servers in this way – especially if those addresses are hashed – may not expose much information beyond your IP address or other bits of the so-called “non-identifiable data, ”But at the end of the day, the data is still data and that data still goes to Google.
Earlier this week, Apple’s head of engineering for WebKit confirmed that Apple’s attempt to intercept this traffic is a way of “limiting the risk of information leakage”. In other words, it’s a way to keep Google’s dirty hands away from any user data, no matter how innocuous the reason may seem..
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