Apple Trains Their Sights on Google (and Waze)

Sami Fathi, also reporting for MacRumors:

Starting with iOS and iPadOS 14.5, Apple will proxy Google's "Safe Browsing" service used in Safari through its own servers instead of relying on Google as a way to limit which personal data Google sees about users.

While Google doesn't know which specific URL you're trying to visit, it may collect your IP address during its interaction with Safari. Now on iOS/iPadOS 14.5, that's no longer the case.

Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors:

The iOS 14.5 beta, available to developers and public beta testers, adds a new Apple Maps feature that lets you report accidents, hazards, and speed checks along your route when getting directions.

Apple is out for blood with the privacy measures, and I’m here for it.

The change for safe browsing doesn’t seem like a big deal and it isn’t something users will notice, since Google wasn’t getting the URL you were gong to in the first place, but this also prevents them from getting your IP address, and a good rule of thumb is the less information funneled through Google, the better.

However, the change for Maps is huge. If it proves popular, it could effectively kill Waze on iOS. Apple’s implementation of crowdsourced traffic conditions certainly isn't as robust and feature heavy as Waze, but honestly, Waze was a pain to use from a design perspective, and its feature set was bloated. Apple’s option is a lot more straightforward while still conveying most of the data you’d want. I could see them expanding it a little bit in the future (to give more specific options for road hazards, or to indicate heavy traffic without any apparent accidents), but since it is a feature that most people will use while driving, the simpler it is to report conditions, the better.

These are two great steps to reducing iOS users’ reliance on Google, but the most obvious step remains: stripping Google’s status as the default search engine in Safari. That may not be super popular with users at first, but if more people realized that Google remembers every query they make and then uses that data against them, AND the new default search engine is at least 90% as good as Google (which has been getting steadily worse, increasingly bloated with advertisements), I think Apple could throw up a splash screen that would convince people to try the new option (or just don’t even clue users in until they start making queries and notice they aren’t landing on Google). Speaking of that new option, I think the best bet would be for Apple to just build their own search engine, but they could also set DuckDuckGo (the browser I personally use, because it doesn’t track or record your search history and sell you out to companies looking to buy that data) as the out-of-the-box browser and make users change it back to Google if they don’t like DDG, perhaps even explaining the privacy differences in the settings menu or forcing them to tap accept on a pop up acknowledging that they’re choosing to use a search engine that tracks them.