If you use the Apple Safari browser regularly, you are probably familiar with “Fraudulent warning on the site,” which gives you high attention if the site you are going to visit could be, say, a elaborate phishing 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, it will be released soon out in iOS 14, it seems that Apple has completely broken these ties.
MacRumors was the first to notice some screenshots of iOS 14.5 beta are changed on Reddit that it looks clear Apple uses its own servers as an intermediary between your phone and Google databases. As shown in the original poster, it appears that any web traffic on Safari stops at a new URL – “proxy.safebrowsing.apple” – before hitting your own Google service.
In short, “Google Safe Browsing“The database is essentially a list of sites that are known to be rogue or insecure in a way that Google constantly updates by crawling the web. Non-Google applications – such as, say, Safari – can Fasten your to Google servers and receive either a hashed or non-hash list of prefixes from these scam sites. After you do this, any click will instinctively ping Google’s servers to see if the visited web address matches any of the names in this list. If they do, a warning signal goes up.
The problem here is that Google is, well, Google, and Apple has made a strong effort to protect privacy and data in the nucleus from iOS 14 updates. If you ping Google’s servers in this way – especially if those addresses are hashed – you may not expose too much information other than your IP address or other bits from the so-called “unidentifiable data“But at the end of the day, the data is still data, and this data is still intended for 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 dirty hands away from any user data, no matter how harmless the reason may seem..
G / O Media may receive a commission