Apple keeps Google’s talking eyes out of iOS 14

If you regularly use Apple’s Safari browser, you are probably familiar with the ‘Fraudulent Website Warning,“which give you an edge if the site you are going to visit may be, say, a extensive phishing scam. What you probably did not know is that this security feature has so far relied on an obscure Google database to function. Now, as part of the privacy features that will soon start rolling out in iOS 14, it looks like Apple is breaking the ties completely.

MacRumors was the first to note some screenshots of the iOS 14.5 beta are swapped over Reddit that clearly show Apple uses its own servers as an intermediary between your phone and Google’s databases. As the original poster outlined, it appears that any web traffic on Safari makes a stopwatch for a new URL – “proxy.safebrowsing.apple” – before Google hits its own service.

In a nutshell, the “Google Safe Browsing‘Database is essentially a list of sites that are known to be fraudulent or insecure in some way, and that Google is constantly updating by searching the web. Non-Google applications – such as Safari – can hook themselves to the Google servers and receive a list of prefixes or non-hash prefixes from these rogue sites. If you do, any instinctive click on Google’s servers to see if the web address visited matches any of the names on this list. If they do, a warning flag will go up.

The problem here is that Google is, Google, and Apple made a good effort to exercise privacy and data protection deepest from iOS 14 updates. If you ping Google’s servers in this way, especially if the addresses are hashed, you can not get too much information besides your IP address or other pieces called ‘unidentifiable data, ”But at the end of the day, data is still data, and that data still goes to Google.

Earlier this week, Apple’s chief engineer for WebKit confirm that Apple’s attempt to intercept this traffic is a way to limit ‘the risk of information leaks’. In other words, it’s a way to keep Google’s filthy hands off user data, no matter how innocent the reason may seem..