TEKNOKU.me – After allegedly sending Safari browser data to a Chinese company, Tencent, Apple denied doing so. According to them, Apple has never shared user data with third parties.
Apple said that the Safari Fraudulent Website Warning feature at issue by the public is a security feature to check whether a website is dangerous or not.
This feature can check the URL of the page opened from a list of known websites and will display a warning if the site is known to be dangerous. A site will be marked as insecure if it is indicated to be committing a malicious act such as a scam or phishing.
“Apple hides information about the pages visited by users when checking whether the pages visited are dangerous or not,” Apple wrote.
“Site pages that are being visited by users have never been shared with third parties,” Apple continued.
Apple said that although the URL pages visited by users were hidden, the IP addresses of the computers concerned were still shared with Tencent.
But users who feel uncomfortable can turn off the service via the settings page on their respective devices.
But the risk is that dangerous sites will not be filtered out. Fraudulent Website Warning is activated by default in Safari without giving a notification to the user.
Apple itself has begun integrating the Safe Browsing function of Tencent in the Safari browser for users from China since 2017. Therefore, it may be that the operating system version before iOS 13 has already started forwarding data to China.
This security feature called Fraudulent Website Warning works by sending and collecting information from Google Safe Browsing. Later it was discovered that the feature also provided information to Tencent Safe Browsing.
Tencent itself is a large company from China engaged in technology. Therefore, Apple also added that this feature only affects iPhone users in the Chinese region.