In a world where every tech company is sharing and selling user data, Apple has always tried to maintain a high-ground with user privacy being a key focus for the company. On iOS 13, Apple is sharing some portion of your web browsing history with the Chinese conglomerate Tencent. This is being done as part of Apple’s “Fraudulent Website Warning”, which uses the Google-developed Safe Browsing technology as the back end.
However, according to multiple user reports, Safari in iOS is sending safe browsing data to Tencent servers in China. Safari has its good reputation of always sending safe browsing data to Google’s servers for its “Fraudulent Website Warning” system which protects users from accidentally going to phishing websites, data being sent to Tencent is a much bigger deal to most users.
With the new update, Apple may now send the browsing data to the Chinese company Tencent. Before this update, Apple made use of Google’s Safe Browsing technology alone for the “Fraudulent Website Warning” feature. According to reports four billion devices use Google’s Safe Browsing technology every day.
Google Safe Browsing shows warnings to users once they decide to navigate to dangerous sites or transfer dangerous files. It is yet unknown the real reason why it is sharing the data with Tencent and how it believes that users’ data is safe with Tencent. Since Tencent is a Chinese company, there are possibilities that the Chinese government will build the corporate to use this knowledge to spot and track users.
