Apple Under Fire Over Sending Some Users Browsing Data to China’s Tencent

Do you know Apple is sending iOS web browsing data of some of
its users to Chinese Internet company Tencent?

I am sure many of you are not aware of this, neither was I, and
believe me, none of us could expect this from a tech company that
promotes itself as a champion of consumer privacy.

Late last week, it was widely revealed^[1] that starting from at
least iOS 12.2^[2], Apple silently
integrated the “Tencent Safe Browsing” service to power its
“Fraudulent Website Warning” feature in the Safari web
browser for both iOS and macOS.

Just like the Safe Browsing feature in Chrome and Mozilla
Firefox, Safari’s fraudulent website warning feature has also been
designed to protect users from various online threats by simply
checking every website they visit against a regularly updated list
of malicious websites.

Until iOS 12.2, Apple primarily relied on the database of
“blacklisted websites” provided by Google’s Safe Browsing service,
which obviously had a privacy drawback, i.e., Google could know
what websites you visit and may also log your IP address to
maintain your browsing history.

Now having Tencent on the same list, Apple is also giving the same
privileges to the Chinese company as of Google.

To be honest, it’s not that Tencent is evil, people are actually
not comfortable in sharing their data with Tencent because the
company has close ties with the Beijing government with
questionable history in aiding censorship in the country.

Also, it’s more concerning because on iOS, every third-party app
and browser, even Google Chrome, are restricted by Apple to use its
own WebKit rendering engine that contains the questionable feature,
which indirectly makes it hard for iOS users to skip using it.

Does Apple Share Non-Chinese Users Browsing Data with
Tencent?

Since Apple has not precisely mentioned in its privacy policy about
this neither it commented on this matter until now, it’s not clear
at this moment if Safari is also using Tencent Safe Browsing
outside of China.

However, it’s very much likely that Tencent’s list of
blacklisted websites is used only in China, where Google services
are banned, as an alternative to providing fraudulent website
warning feature in the country.

Apple users and privacy advocates are negatively reacting about the
news, and that’s because people expect “full disclosure” of such a
major feature from the company that has a long history of
announcing every small detail—including the addition of a few new
emojis or some changes in menu options—on the stage in front of
hundreds of journalists.

Anyway, if this feature worries you, you have the choice to turn
the Fraudulent Website Warning feature OFF in Safari, but if want
to be vigilance against sketchy and phishing pages, I would not
recommend you to play with it as disabling the feature makes you
lose access to Google’s service as well.

Since this feature comes enabled by default on all iPhones and
iPads running iOS 13, users have to disable it by following these
steps manually:

On iPhones: Go to Settings → Safari → Turn off Fraudulent
Website Warning
On macOS: Head on to Safari → Preferences → Security → Uncheck Warn
when visiting a fraudulent website