If you regularly apply Apple ’s Safari web browser , you ’re believably familiar with its “ Fraudulent Website Warning , ” which gives you a heads up if the site you ’re about to visit might be , say , anelaborate phishing cozenage . What you probably did n’t know is that until now , this condom characteristic relied on an obscure Google database to operate . Now , as part of the privateness features soon turn over out iniOS 14 , it wait like Apple ’s severing those crosstie entirely .
MacRumors was thefirst to noticesome screenshots of the iOS 14.5 beta being swapped over Reddit thatclearly showApple using its own server as a wholesaler between your phone and Google ’s databases . As the original poster laid out , it seems that any web dealings on Safari makes a pit halt to a fresh URL — “ proxy.safebrowsing.apple”—before arrive at Google ’s own service .
In a nutshell , the “ Google Safe Browsing ” database is essentially a list of site that are known to be scammy or unsafe in some way that Google perpetually update by crawl the web . Non - Google apps — like , say , Safari — canhook themselves upto Google ’s servers and incur either a hashed or non - hashed inclination of prefixes from these scammy sites . Upon doing so , any click instinctively ping Google ’s server to see if the entanglement address being visited match with any of the name on this listing . If they do , a warning flag travel up .
Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)
The issue here is that Google is , well , Google , and Apple has been making a square effort to put privateness and data protectionsat the coreof the iOS 14 update . Pinging Google ’s server in this way – particularly if those computer address are hashed — might not debunk too much information besides your IP address or other routine of so - called “ unidentifiable information , ” but at the end of the day , data point is still data , and that data is still live on to Google .
to begin with this week , the Apple ’s technology head for WebKitconfirmedthat Apple ’s attack to wiretap this traffic is a path to “ limit the jeopardy of information outflow . ” In other word , it ’s a way to keep Google ’s grubby hands off of any user data , no matter how innocent the understanding may seem .
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