Am I the only one who thinks that this is a neutral move with some pedestrian reason like "we'd like to be able to dynamically change our Safe Browsing endpoint in the future" or "let's not hardcode our API keys into Safari"?
In aggregate, that's not insignificant traffic, so you wouldn't want to use your own resources to process it without a worthwhile reason.
what??
If you're doing the blocking yourself on your own network then sure whatever, you don't really care whether google stuff breaks, but you probably also have safebrowsing disabled, or know how to whitelist the safebrowsing endpoint yourself if you need it, so the whitelist argument isn't relevant in that context.
If that was the case, here was the original comment.
> Apple servers are whitelisted in adblocking and firewall APIs
What exactly did you disagree with?
However people can disobey our laws and so if they aren't popular enough they're worthless. The UK used to have laws controlling the ownership of dogs. Each dog required a license, licenses were taxed and you could be refused a license. But that law was very unpopular, and so it was abolished - not because licensing dog ownership wasn't a good idea, but because even if it was a great idea it was too unpopular to succeed.
I am pretty sure whitelisting servers don't follow the laws of Thermodynamics or nature.
Without the human invention of entropy, we'd have no clue why our perpetual motion machines aren't working.
For the mechanics those laws describe, they're great too. Pretty sure there would be constant unwanted explosions everywhere if energy could keep transforming in any way where it's conserved. I like that my table doesn't decide to be a bomb at random
Trust does not compartmentalize.
This is a fair assumption to challenge. Lots of developers co-mingling their traffic with an ad company doesn't mean everyone has to whitelist their servers. It's an impediment. But Apple has navigated those.
this doesn't really pass the smell test of "is there something fishy going on around here?"
(from personal experience, we used a service in a project once to fetch stock market data. It was a good faith agreement, we had to maintain our own tallies of how often a stock price was fetched, tell them, and we'd be charged accordingly. This made sense because from them we just got a 20 mbit inbound pipeline of stock updates, which we fed into a Gemfire (which is now apparently called "VMware Tanzu™ GemFire®") cluster and exposed to end-users via a simple REST API. (It was a bank, of course we couldn't change firewall rules to allow websockets or whatever was available at the time).
How is this about "data mining"? If they have built their own safe browsing service they'd be in the exact same position to do data mining!
I'm sure Apple doesn't need to build APIs to do data mining on their own users. It would be very un-apple to create an API like this and allow non-apple devices to use it. So where is the benefit on data mining?
Privacy (in a consumer and marketing sense) is a major market advantage. I think that Apple has determined that keeping data away from 3rd parties is a good way to capitalize on that market edge vs. giving up the edge and engaging in the same consumer exploitation as their competitors.
I agree, this seems like the simplest and most straight-forward explanation to me.
If they wanted to claim privacy advantage, they could offer these lists for rsyncable download, like antivirus of more civilized eras used to do.
How does Apple building its own service smell like "data mining"? You can build your own service and not be a data miner.
It's free. https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/pricing
Emphasis 'all'. There may be meetings, but it's still free.
Whether it is or isn't (at the moment) data mining I won't debate.
My concern is sending that much of my behavioural information through a point controlled by one party.