Apple’s new privacy feature designed to hide users’ web browsing from Internet service providers and advertisers will no longer be available on ChinaSaudi Arabia or Belarus, the company said.
It is one of a number of privacy protections an Apple It was announced at the annual Software Developers Conference on Monday, the latest in years of efforts by the company to reduce tracking of its users by advertisers and third parties.
Apple also said it would not offer a “special relay” in Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines.
Its decision to block the feature in China, for regulatory reasons, is the latest in a series of concessions the company has made to privacy in a country that accounts for nearly 15% of its revenue.
In 2018, Apple transferred the digital keys used to lock iCloud data from Chinese users, allowing authorities to work through local courts to access the information.
China’s ruling Communist Party maintains an extensive monitoring system to monitor how citizens use the country’s tightly controlled internet. Under President Xi Jinping, the space for dissent in China has narrowed, while censorship has expanded.
Apple’s private relay feature first sends web traffic to a server maintained by Apple, where it is stripped of a piece of information called an IP address. From there, Apple sends traffic to a second server managed by an external carrier that assigns users a temporary IP address and sends the traffic to its destination website.
Apple says that third-party use of the second-hop page system is intended to prevent even Apple from knowing the user’s identity and what websites the user is visiting.
Apple has not disclosed which third-party partners it will use in the system but said it plans to name them in the future. This feature will likely not be publicly available until later this year.
IP addresses can be used to track users in a number of ways, including as a critical component of “fingerprinting” – the practice in which advertisers collect discrete data to infer a user’s identity. Both Apple and Alphabet Inc prohibit this.
Along with Apple’s previous move, the private page feature “would render IP addresses useless as a fingerprinting mechanism,” Charles Farina, head of innovation at digital marketing firm Adswerve, told Reuters.
It would also prevent advertisers from using IP addresses to find someone, he said.
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