Security News > 2023 > August > Google Gmail continuously nagging to enable Enhanced Safe Browsing
Google is urging users to activate its Enhanced Safe Browsing feature via numerous alerts in Gmail that keep coming back, even after you acknowledge them.
Enhanced Safe Browsing was released in 2007 as an upgrade to Google's standard Safe Browsing feature that warns users when they visit known phishing and malware sites.
The difference between the two security features is that Safe Browsing will compare a visited site to a locally stored list of domains, compared to Enhanced Safe Browser, which will check if a site is malicious in real-time against Google's cloud services.
While it may seem like Enhanced Safe Browsing is the better way to go, there is a slight trade-off in privacy, as Chrome and Gmail will share URLs with Google to check if they are malicious and temporarily associate this information with your signed-in Google account.
A banner with the message "Get additional protection against phishing. Turn on Enhanced Safe Browsing to get additional protection against dangerous emails" persistently shows up in Gmail on both Chrome for Windows and Android, providing users with two options: 'Continue' and 'No, thanks'.
Google justifies this by stating, "We do this so that when an attack is detected against your browser or account, Safe Browsing can tailor its protections to your situation. After a short period, Safe Browsing anonymizes this data so it is no longer connected to your account."