Safari does use Tencent to ensure that users in China do not navigate to malicious websites, but it never sends the actual URL of a visited site to the Chinese company, Apple says.
The explanation was given following a series of reports that Safari is sending user data to the Chinese conglomerate, thus spurring multiple privacy concerns among users.
The tech giant, however, says it only sends bits of browsing data to Tencent, and that the URL the user attempts to access is never shared with the company. However, the user’s IP address might be.
“Before visiting a website, Safari may send information calculated from the website address to Google Safe Browsing and Tencent Safe Browsing to check if the website is fraudulent. These safe browsing providers may also log your IP address,” Apple’s About Safari & Privacy page reads.
The sharing of bits of user data with a safe browsing provider isn’t new. In fact, in the first version of Google Safe Browsing, the entire visited URL was sent to Google and checked against a list of fraudulent sites. The user IP address was also sent to the Internet giant.
To address privacy concerns, Google changed the mechanism to a safer one, where a SHA256 hash of each unsafe URL in the database is computed and truncated down to a 32-bit prefix, and then the entire database of truncated hashes is sent to the browser.
Thus, when visiting a URL, the browser can check if the site is safe by hashing it ..
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