Apple, oh Apple.  As of late, they’ve come into the spotlight once again, because this time they were discovered to have been ‘sending’ its consumers’s Safari browsing data to the Chinese company, Tencent. This information included was websites visited, as well as the IP address of each iOS user.

If you were curious why, or for how long this has been going on, hopefully this answers your question. For almost two years, Apple has been sending data to Tencent as part of an iPhone and iPad security feature that warns users if a sure is unsafe, or malicious, before it’s loaded. As of now, Apple checks addresses against a list of known sites that are problematic. That list is also maintained by Tencent, for users in China, and by Google for other regions.

These findingers were first published by a cryptographer, Matthew Green, where he found the privacy policy fine print that Apple uses Google and Tencent to check for fraudulent websites. Then, Green found out that the data being sent might include previous websites visited, as well as the users IP addresses.

Apple later on addressed the allegations, by saying that the safe browsing feature by Tencent only affects devices withing the China region. Devices outside of China are checked and verified by Google instead.

They go on to say that the URL of a website is never shared, and that the feature can be turned off. But this does make browsing a bit less secure.