<story><title>Apple Is Sending URLs to Tencent?</title><url>https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1183391221861027841</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yorwba</author><text>This is really a &amp;quot;damned if you do, damned if you don&amp;#x27;t&amp;quot; kind of situation.&lt;p&gt;They can either use Tencent&amp;#x27;s Safe Browsing API as a drop-in replacement for Google&amp;#x27;s API, relying on k-anonymity to leak as little information as possible. That leaves them open to accusations that they allow Tencent (or, for that matter, Google) to track the browsing history of Safari users.&lt;p&gt;Or they can essentially turn off Safe Browsing in China. (Google&amp;#x27;s API is collateral damage of the Great Firewall.) That leaves their users unprotected against all kinds of malware and scams.&lt;p&gt;I think they made the right call here by protecting users against the most common threat (most people are not dissidents), while giving advanced users with a different threat model the opportunity to opt out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rsync</author><text>&amp;quot;Or they can essentially turn off Safe Browsing in China.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The OP as well as the associated blog post[1] as well as the Apple-provided fine-print language do not make it clear to me that this &amp;quot;feature&amp;quot; is exclusively enabled for Chinese users (or, perhaps Chinese IPs).&lt;p&gt;Could someone point to a source that confirms a US person, in the US, with a US-purchased iphone, would not have their browsing history transformed and sent away for analysis to tencent ?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.cryptographyengineering.com&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;13&amp;#x2F;dear-apple-safe-browsing-might-not-be-that-safe&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;blog.cryptographyengineering.com&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;10&amp;#x2F;13&amp;#x2F;dear-app...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple Is Sending URLs to Tencent?</title><url>https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1183391221861027841</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>yorwba</author><text>This is really a &amp;quot;damned if you do, damned if you don&amp;#x27;t&amp;quot; kind of situation.&lt;p&gt;They can either use Tencent&amp;#x27;s Safe Browsing API as a drop-in replacement for Google&amp;#x27;s API, relying on k-anonymity to leak as little information as possible. That leaves them open to accusations that they allow Tencent (or, for that matter, Google) to track the browsing history of Safari users.&lt;p&gt;Or they can essentially turn off Safe Browsing in China. (Google&amp;#x27;s API is collateral damage of the Great Firewall.) That leaves their users unprotected against all kinds of malware and scams.&lt;p&gt;I think they made the right call here by protecting users against the most common threat (most people are not dissidents), while giving advanced users with a different threat model the opportunity to opt out.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matthewdgreen</author><text>Alternatively, they could purchase the data from Tencent or another company, and operate their own version of the service. That may even be what they’re doing —- but we don’t know, since they launched the service with no details or publicity.</text></comment>