Apple Inc. came under fire on Monday for sending web browsing data, including IP addresses, to China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd.
For about two years, Apple has been sending data to Tencent as part of an iPhone and iPad security feature that warns users if a website is malicious or unsafe before they load it. The U.S. company checks addresses against an existing list of sites known to be problematic. That list is maintained by Tencent for users in mainland China and by Google for other regions, including in the U.S.
In newer versions of Apple’s iOS operating systems, the company says this feature “may also log your IP address,” potentially providing Tencent, a Chinese internet conglomerate with government ties, data such as a user’s location. The safe browsing feature with Google was first added to iOS in 2008, but it was expanded to include Tencent with iOS 11 in 2017. Apple updated its description of the feature in more recent versions of iOS.
“We deserve to be informed about this kind of change and to make choices about it,” Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, post. “Users should learn about these changes before Apple pushes the feature into production, and thus asks millions of their customers to trust them.”This isn’t the first time Apple has been criticized for working with a Chinese company to handle local data. In 2018, AppleMore recently, Apple has been scrutinized for what some see as appeasing China. BuzzFeed recently reported that
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