If you regularly use Apple’s Safari browser, you probably know “Fraudulent website warning,” Which one alerts you if this may be the place you are about to visit, say, a craft a fishing scam. What you probably didn’t know is that until now this security feature relied on an obscure Google database to function. Now, as part of the privacy features, they will be posted soon inside iOS 14, it seems that Apple has completely cut these ties.
MacRumors was the first he realizes it some screenshots of iOS 14.5 beta are changed for Reddit that show clearly Apple uses its own servers as an intermediary between the phone and Google’s databases. As shown in the original poster, it appears that any web traffic in Safari stops at a new URL (“proxy.safebrowsing.apple”) before reaching Google’s own service.
In short, the “Google Safe Browsing“The database is essentially a list of sites that are known to be scamming or insecure in some way that Google constantly updates by crawling the web. Non-Google applications, such as Safari, can connect on Google’s servers and receive a summary or non-summary list of prefixes from these scam sites. In doing so, clicks 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 indicator appears.
The problem here is that Google is, well, Google, and Apple has been making a great effort to protect privacy and data in the core from iOS 14 updates. Pinging Google’s servers in this way (especially if these addresses have a hash) may not expose too much information in addition to your IP address or other so-called bits. “unidentifiable data“But at the end of the day, the data is still data and that data is still going to Google.
Earlier this week, Apple’s chief engineer for WebKit confirmed that Apple’s attempt to intercept this traffic is a way to “limit the risk of information leakage”. In other words, it’s a way to keep Google’s annoying hands out of any user data, no matter how harmless the reason may seem..
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