Enhanced digital protection is already available to users of the most popular browser.
Google introduced an innovation for the Chrome browser, aimed at improving user privacy in real time. The added security feature allows you to hide the URLs of visited sites from prying eyes, including Google itself. This option is now enabled by default in the standard "Safe Browsing" mode.
For many years, the Secure Browsing feature automatically added potentially insecure URLs to the list stored on the user's device. Each time you visited a site, the browser checked its address against this list, warning the user about a possible threat. However, the local database was updated only once every 30-60 minutes, which made it impossible to detect threats on short-term existing sites in time.
The Enhanced protection mode offered a solution to this problem by using a server-side "Safe Browsing" database, which allowed you to identify dangerous URLs faster. However, to do this, users were required to provide the "corporation of good" with additional security data.
The new version of Safe Browsing offers an alternative: an API that prevents Google from knowing which URLs a user has visited. Instead, when it detects unknown sites, the browser sends encrypted versions of them to an independent Fastly privacy server.
This server removes any user IDs from the URL and passes them to the Secure Browsing database via a secure TLS connection. Google claims that thanks to this mechanism, the confidentiality of user data is maintained throughout the entire process.
According to Google, thanks to this update, the "Safe Browsing" feature will be able to block 25% more phishing attempts. Both Standard and enhanced modes now support real-time verification, but Enhanced Protection mode offers enhanced protection with additional features such as artificial intelligence to block attacks, deep file scanning, and additional protection against dangerous Chrome extensions.
The new real-time feature is already available in the desktop and iOS versions of Chrome, and it will be released on Android later in the month.
Google introduced an innovation for the Chrome browser, aimed at improving user privacy in real time. The added security feature allows you to hide the URLs of visited sites from prying eyes, including Google itself. This option is now enabled by default in the standard "Safe Browsing" mode.
For many years, the Secure Browsing feature automatically added potentially insecure URLs to the list stored on the user's device. Each time you visited a site, the browser checked its address against this list, warning the user about a possible threat. However, the local database was updated only once every 30-60 minutes, which made it impossible to detect threats on short-term existing sites in time.
The Enhanced protection mode offered a solution to this problem by using a server-side "Safe Browsing" database, which allowed you to identify dangerous URLs faster. However, to do this, users were required to provide the "corporation of good" with additional security data.
The new version of Safe Browsing offers an alternative: an API that prevents Google from knowing which URLs a user has visited. Instead, when it detects unknown sites, the browser sends encrypted versions of them to an independent Fastly privacy server.
This server removes any user IDs from the URL and passes them to the Secure Browsing database via a secure TLS connection. Google claims that thanks to this mechanism, the confidentiality of user data is maintained throughout the entire process.
According to Google, thanks to this update, the "Safe Browsing" feature will be able to block 25% more phishing attempts. Both Standard and enhanced modes now support real-time verification, but Enhanced Protection mode offers enhanced protection with additional features such as artificial intelligence to block attacks, deep file scanning, and additional protection against dangerous Chrome extensions.
The new real-time feature is already available in the desktop and iOS versions of Chrome, and it will be released on Android later in the month.
