Apple Accused Of Sending Data From 1 Billion+ iPhones And iPads To China - Forbes

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Apple has found itself in the middle of another storm in a China teacup, this one relating to the company’s inclusion of a Chinese company’s safe browsing service within its Safari web browser. The issue came to the fore when Reclaim The Net published an article on October 10 which warned that “it’s been discovered that Apple, which often positions itself as a champion of privacy and human rights, is sending some IP addresses from users of its Safari browser on iOS to Chinese conglomerate Tencent—a company with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party.”

Apple also uses Google’s equivalent safe browsing service, and let’s face it that’s a company with its own questionable track record on data privacy.

There’s little technical substance here—the inclusion of Tencent’s Safe Browsing is old news, and has been in the public domain since 2017. There is also ambiguity as to whether this impacts Chinese iOS users or has spread further afield. Apple clearly can use this more widely, but it doesn’t mean that it does. And to be honest, if there is a privacy breach here it would be of much more concern for users inside than outside China—users for which it’s not news. Let’s be clear, paint the Chinese state any way you like, but it has neither the means nor the motive to track the superficial web browsing activities of 1 billion plus iPhone and iPad users.

“It’s unclear when Apple started allowing Tencent and Google to log some user IP addresses,” Reclaim The Net says, “but one Twitter user reported seeing this change to Safari as early as the iOS 12.2 beta in February 2019. Safari is the default browser on iOS devices... Even if people install a third-party browser on their iOS device, viewing web pages inside apps still opens them in an integrated form of Safari called Safari View Controller... forcing people back into Safari make it difficult for people to avoid the Safari browser completely when using an iPhone or iPad.”

But, unsurprisingly, this prompted the usual Apple China backlash, with users taking to the internet to share their intent to turn off safe browsing, such was their concern about the invasion of personal privacy Beijing was about too inflict on them. Others sensibly dismissed the dangers—almost all of which are ambiguous. Ultimately, though, the very real risk is that a theoretical issue of data being shared with China could see users turn off defences against the very real issue of phishing scams.

Safe browsing is intended to do no more than warn users when they try to visit a suspected phishing site—as Apple explains, it helps prevent users visiting a fraudulent website which “masquerades as a legitimate one, such as a bank, financial institution or email service provider.” The issue, though, is that “before you visit a website, Safari may send information calculated from the website address to Safe Browsing providers to check if the website is fraudulent.” And one of those providers is Tencent, a conglomerate that is very much inside Beijing’s circle of trust.

Tencent is accused of supporting surveillance activities within China, with the likes of QQ and WeChat allegedly supporting state monitoring to varying levels. And along with fellow Chinese giants Baidu and Alibaba, Tencent is a major investor in the surveillance tech industry, several entities from which have recently been blacklisted by the U.S. government for “human rights violations” against the minority Uighur Muslim population in the country's Xinjiang region.

And so inside China this issue could be more worrying, and is consistent with allegations that Apple can be pushed around by Beijing. “IP addresses can reveal user locations and be used to profile users across devices,” Reclaim The Net explains. “If Tencent logs the IP address of an iPhone or iPad user through its Safe Browsing service, this information could potentially be used to identify the owner of the device by searching for instances of the IP address across Tencent’s other services.”

But the article quickly prompted a backlash on Reddit, with one user complaining that “the article is not only wrong, it is dangerous—already you can see people who don't understand this who will turn this off and expose themselves to dangers, without any meaningful gain in privacy.”

So what’s the risk here? If you’re in the U.S. or Europe and you’re not already on China’s watchlist, then there is no issue. If you are on their radar, so to speak, they don’t need to use Tencent’s Safe Browsing service to track you across the internet. There are easier and more rewarding ways to follow you around. If you’re in China, though, there is every chance that such data is collected and used. But most people in China believe the state tracks online activity anyway—this is not new news.

But the real issue here is for Apple. It’s another day another headline implying that the company is compromising its own standards and user privacy protections to benefit the Chinese state. And for the U.S. tech giant that is an issue, because quite apart from this issue there is substance to its troubled stance on China. And so while this backlash might be undeserved, the big picture needs addressing by Apple, and fast.

I’m not including instructions on turning off safe browsing here because to do so would be irresponsible.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/10/14/apple-accused-of-sending-data-from-1-billion-iphones-and-ipads-to-china/

2019-10-14 10:53:17Z
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