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Comment by zwaps | Hacker News Reader

They are sending data to what is essentially a state-owned company that can facilitate building user profiles (with enough compute) and is, besides that, explicitly used to censor the web.

What is not to understand?

Apple should send precisely nothing to the CCP if they care about their users privacy on principle.

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People unfortunately don't get that and are being slow cooked into accepting being spied on.

I paid for device and then you prevent me from doing perfectly legal action and then notify authorities about it. That's what it is, and coming from privacy hero, Apple.

That’s the entire purpose of this system. It’s useless for creating user profiles.

The purpose of this system is to censor the internet, no? Isn't that enough?

But that being said, I do not believe that hashes are enough, because all they really need is to know you visited one (hash of) a certain website out of thousands. They do not need proof, and they don't need it to work reliably, and they do not need the model to be precise or good. For the system to work in China, this is sufficient. It need not be perfect, it just needs to loom in the background. People will do the rest themselves.

This, I think, one should not forget, especially if you really, really don't see an issue with what Apple is doing.

I’m not sure I’d call warning people about malware “censoring the internet”. It’s the same system in use in the rest of the world through Google SafeBrowsing. And not just Safari, most other web browsers have some flavour of this as well. But that Google API is not available in China so they use the closest equivalent. AFAIK, the warnings can be bypassed the same in China as in the US, so anger about censorship here seems odd to me.

No it wouldn't. If, as an example, google.com and piracy.com both resolved to the same hash prefix, how would that help you at all? The whole point is that the server sending the blacklist doesn't get the details of the page that's being visited. piracy.com/info, google.com/searchingstuff, and whatthefuck.com/isthis might all have the exact same hash prefix. They don't because I just pulled that out of my rear to use as an example but there's no way for someone to ascertain the content of a website just form the prefixes of these hashes. The browser doesn't even send the details.

Yes it would. All China needs is a correlation. Most users don't input URLs manually, they follow links. So if a user starts from 'taiwan.gov' and goes from there to 'freetibet.org' and 'IhateXi.com'* the firewall would eventually detect from enough matches - even matches with partial hashes - that the user is a 'bad-thinker' and deduct social credit accordingly.

Apple could have tried to avoid helping the Great Firewall (e.g. a proxy could hide times and anonymize IPs) but chose not to.

* fictional names inserted only for example's sake.

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