Apple Responds To Reports About Sending Safari Data To China

According to a recent report, Apple has come under fire after it was discovered that the company could be sending the browsing data of users to Tencent, a company based in China. This is controversial as China is known to have pretty heavy censorship policies and monitoring of its citizens, and there are many who aren’t happy that Apple seems to be bending over backwards to keep China happy so that they can still keep doing business in the country.

For those wondering if these reports are true, Apple has since provided a statement to Bloomberg to clarify what really goes down. According to the company’s response, “Apple protects user privacy and safeguards your data with Safari Fraudulent Website Warning, a security feature that flags websites known to be malicious in nature. When the feature is enabled, Safari checks the website URL against lists of known websites and displays a warning if the URL the user is visiting is suspected of fraudulent conduct like phishing.”

“To accomplish this task, Safari  receives a list of websites known to be malicious from Google, and for devices with their region code set to mainland China, it receives a list from Tencent. The actual URL of a website you visit is never shared with a safe browsing provider and the feature can be turned off.”

Basically, this only affects users who have set their iPhone region as China. If you’re living in the US and have set your region to the US or anywhere else in the world, then this won’t affect you.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, General
Tags: China, iOS, macOS, Privacy, safari