Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Apple will proxy Safe Browsing traffic on iOS 14.5 to hide user IPs from Google | ZDNet (www.zdnet.com)

submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Apparently Apple will proxy Safe Browsing Requests to Google to reduce Google's visibility into iOS users activity. The article doesn't mention what Apple itself does with the information if users should have a proxy in front of apple too ...

But while Google has anonymized URL strings, by sending the link in a cropped and hashed state, Google still sees the IP address from where a Safe Browsing check comes through.

Apple's new feature basically takes all these Safe Browsing checks and passes them through an Apple-owned proxy server, making all requests appear as coming from the same IP address.

More information here as well:

https://the8-bit.com/apple-proxies-google-safe-browsing-privacy/

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago (2 children)

FYI, Google and most major sites also use browser fingerprinting to track you, which hiding your IP address won't prevent. You'd have to disable JavaScript and hide your IP, and even then things like your user agent string could still identify you.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago (1 children)

I think in this case they are talking about the Safe Browsing API which in theory Google says they don't use for tracking, but still making that API call reveals header info, so Apple is shielding some info from Google. But in regular interactions with google tentacles, they do use many things like you say.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago)

Fair enough. However, in that case I really don't think it will do much for privacy because one, almost everyone straight up use Google services every day, and two, Google embeds itself in the majority of other sites through Google Ads, Analytics, reCaptcha, as well as their font and CDN services. Not to mention they also do cloud server hosting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago

I've stopped trying to make a non-unique fingerprint, get the extensions I want, and instead use Tor to look up stuff or login to places not connected to my identity AFAIK. So normal browsing is for specific topics like troubleshooting my devices.

Surveillance scores are already a thing in the US, but protected by the FTC and more hidden than China's social credit score. Not to mention, the data broker market is poorly regulated and very opaque. I like to minimize how much incriminating or intimate data I reveal, partly because they may very well be considered with my job applications or affect my experience as a customer.