Security News > 2024 > March > Google gooses Safe Browsing with real-time protection that doesn't leak to ad giant

Google has enhanced its Safe Browsing service to enable real-time protection in Chrome for desktop, iOS, and soon Android against risky websites, without sending browsing history data to the ad biz.

Safe Browsing is a non-commercial Google API that allows client applications to lookup websites in a database to see whether they pose a known risk.

The Standard version of Safe Browsing will support real-time data lookup, but without sending browsing history data back to Google.

In a blog post, Jasika Bawa, Google Chrome Security, Xinghui Lu, Google Chrome Security, Jonathan Li, Google Safe Browsing, and Alex Wozniak, Google Safe Browsing, explain that the locally stored list of suspect sites gets updated every 30 to 60 minutes using hash-based checks, but that's no longer adequate.

So in Chrome for desktop and iOS, and Android later this month, the Standard tier of Safe Browsing is getting privacy-preserving, real-time protection.

These get encrypted and sent to an Oblivious HTTP privacy server operated by Fastly that removes any potential user identifiers and forwards the cleaned result to the Google Safe Browsing server.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/14/google_safe_browsing_update/