Apple is keeping Google’s prying eyes out of iOS 14

If you regularly use Apple’s Safari browser, you probably know his “Fraudulent website warning,” which warns you if the site you are about to visit is, say, one elaborate phishing scam. What you probably didn’t know is that until now this security feature relied on an obscure Google database to work. Now, as part of the soon to be released privacy features outside in ios 14, it appears that Apple is severing those ties altogether.

MacRumors was the first to notice some screenshots of the beta version of iOS 14.5 shared on Reddit this show clearly Apple uses its own servers as an intermediary between your phone and Google’s databases. As the original poster showcased, it looks like all web traffic on Safari makes a pit stop to a new URL – “proxy.safebrowsing.apple” – before hitting Google’s own service.

In short, the “Google Safe Browsing“The database is basically a list of sites known to be fraudulent or unsafe in some way or another that Google constantly updates as they crawl the web. Non-Google applications, like Safari, for example, can to log in to Google’s servers and receive a hashed or unhashed list of prefixes from these scam sites. In doing so, any click instinctively ping Google’s servers to see if the visited web address matches any of the names on this list. If they do, a warning flag goes up.

The problem here is that Google is, well, Google, and Apple has made a solid effort to put privacy and data protections in place in the heart from iOS 14 updates. Pinging Google’s servers in this manner, especially if those addresses are hashed, may not expose too much information in addition to your IP address or other so-called “stuff”unidentifiable dataBut at the end of the day, data is still data, and that data is still transmitted to Google.

Earlier this week, Apple’s chief engineering officer 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 out of any user data, harmless as it sounds..