"Or they can essentially turn off Safe Browsing in China."

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 "feature" is exclusively enabled for Chinese users (or, perhaps Chinese IPs).

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 ?

[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/10/13/dear-app...