Apparently Apple will proxy Safe Browsing Requests to Google to reduce Google’s visibility into iOS users activity. The article doesn’t mention what Apple itself does with the information if users should have a proxy in front of apple too …
But while Google has anonymized URL strings, by sending the link in a cropped and hashed state, Google still sees the IP address from where a Safe Browsing check comes through.
Apple’s new feature basically takes all these Safe Browsing checks and passes them through an Apple-owned proxy server, making all requests appear as coming from the same IP address.
More information here as well:
https://the8-bit.com/apple-proxies-google-safe-browsing-privacy/
I think in this case they are talking about the Safe Browsing API which in theory Google says they don’t use for tracking, but still making that API call reveals header info, so Apple is shielding some info from Google. But in regular interactions with google tentacles, they do use many things like you say.
Fair enough. However, in that case I really don’t think it will do much for privacy because one, almost everyone straight up use Google services every day, and two, Google embeds itself in the majority of other sites through Google Ads, Analytics, reCaptcha, as well as their font and CDN services. Not to mention they also do cloud server hosting.