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Apple’s latest compromise on privacy in China accounts for nearly 15% of its revenue.
Apple said that due to regulatory reasons, the new “private relay” feature designed to cover up the user’s web browsing behavior of Internet service providers and advertisers will not be available in China.
This feature is one of several privacy protection measures that Apple announced at its annual Software Developers Conference on Monday, and it is the latest move by the company over the years to reduce tracking of its users by advertisers and other third parties.
Apple’s decision to keep this feature in China is the latest in a series of compromises made by the company on privacy issues in a country that accounts for nearly 15% of its revenue.
In 2018, Apple moved the digital key used to lock the iCloud data of Chinese users, allowing the authorities to obtain information through the domestic courts.
China’s ruling Communist Party maintains a huge surveillance system to keep a close watch on how citizens use the country’s strictly controlled Internet. Under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, the space for dissent in China has shrunk and the censorship system has expanded.
No longer need “fingerprints”
Apple’s “private relay” feature first sends network traffic to a server maintained by Apple, where it is stripped of a piece of information called an IP address. From there, Apple sends the traffic to a second server maintained by a third-party operator, which assigns a temporary IP address to the user and continues to send the traffic to its target website.
Apple said that the use of external parties in the second hop of the relay system is intentional to prevent Apple from knowing the identity of the user and the website the user is visiting.
Apple said it will not provide “private relay” services in Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines.
Apple has not yet revealed which external partners will be used in the system, but said it plans to name them in the future. This feature may not be available to the public until later this year.
IP addresses can be used to track users in a variety of ways, including as a key element of “fingerprints,” which is a practice where advertisers string together different data to infer the identity of users. Both Apple and Alphabet Inc’s Google prohibit this.
Charles Farina, head of innovation at the digital marketing company Adswerve, told Reuters that, combined with Apple’s previous steps, the “private relay” function “will effectively make the IP address unable to be used as a fingerprint recognition mechanism.”
He said it can also prevent advertisers from using IP addresses to determine a person’s location.
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