A report from Bloomberg raised concerns about Apple sending user browsing data to Tencent, a Chinese company. Users began to doubt whether Apple is still trustworthy.

What happened?

It was said that your browsing data may be transmitted to Tencent if you enable "Fraudulent Website Warning” on iOS. The big brother might be watching you.

The transmitted data contains users’ browsing history and even sensitive information such as IP addresses and physical locations. It is collected via Safari on your iOS devices. Here is how Apple describes "Fraudulent Website Warning” in "Safari ＆ Privacy”:

Before visiting a website, Safari may send information calculated from the website address to Google Safe Browsing and Tencent Safe Browsing to check if the website is fraudulent. These safe browsing providers may also log your IP address.

It seems that users have a lot of factors to consider when it comes to this issue. In fact, we can find relevant descriptions of "Fraudulent Website Warning” in iOS 11, iOS 12 and 13. Given that Google services are blocked in mainland China, Chinese users are not able to use fraudulent website warning supported by Google Safe Browsing. Therefore, Apple may work with Tencent Safe Browsing to warn users from mainland China when they are trying to visit websites that are known to be malicious from Tencent. On iOS 12, only the simplified Chinese version mentioned Tencent Safe Browsing in the privacy policy. While versions of other languages only mentioned Google Safe Browsing. However, both Google Safe Browsing and Tencent Safe Browsing are included in the description since iOS 12. iOS users from outside mainland China wonder whether their browsing data will be shared with Tencent.

If Tencent can get access to user browsing data, so does Google. Google is also tracking users and knows what they do online. Do users care about privacy or just don’t trust this Chinese company?

Obviously, they don’t trust Tencent because it keeps a close relationship with the Chinese government. But don’t forget that Google, Facebook and other big companies also got into privacy issues again and again.

Besides, you may don’t notice that Tencent has already an important partner of Apple in data security not only in China but also in other countries.

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that apple shared sensitive user data with Tencent and Google. And we don’t know whether user data is used by Tencent and Google for their own purposes. Let’s see how Apple responds.

How did Apple respond?

Apple officials said the "Fraudulent Website Warning” means to warn users of malicious websites that are known to Tencent and Google. Apple aims to protect its users’ privacy and data. Above all, Apple guarantees that it will never share the URLs of the websites you visit with Tencent or Google.

This function is designed to protect users from malicious websites. When you turn it on, Safari will check the URL of the website you are going to visit according to a list of malicious websites provided by Google or Tencent. A warning appears when this website is suspicious. To be specific, Google and Tencent first transfer the URLs of malicious websites into truncated hashes and then send them to Safari. Next, Safari hashes the URL of the website you visit and see if it matches with any of the received hashes. If that’s the case, Safari will ask Google or Tencent for the URLs that contain the matched hashes. Safari tags the page as malicious if it finds it.

So we can see that Google and Tencent are only responsible for providing lists of malicious websites. Since Chinese users cannot use Google services, Tencent will offer safe browsing services to them. While Google provides services for other countries and regions.

Conclusion

In conclusion, iOS users don’t need to have too many concerns about this feature. If you still worry about data leakage, you can turn it off by following our instructions below (by default, this feature is turned on):

Open "Settings”.
Scroll down to "Safari” and click on it.
Find "Fraudulent Website Warning” and disable it.
If you are a Mac user:

Open Safari.
Tap "Preference”.
Tap "Security”.
Turn off "Warn when visiting a fraudulent website”.
fraudulent website warning
But you should also bear in mind that you will lose the high-risk site filtering. And it will increase the risk of visiting fraudulent sites.

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