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.
But Google is already analyzing all emails received. So the only difference is that they actually know which links have been clicked.
The privacy issue is Gmail, not that particular feature.
Don’t use Gmail or Chrome
god, i hate this shit. i have a lot of stuffed tied to my google accounts but i think i’m at least going to switch email apps.
Funny how Firefox can be at least as secure without it having to phone home every time you click on a link.
Usually when this happens, we call it spyware, nuke it from orbit, and find an alternative.
I still get nagged constantly to add a birthday to my Google account to make sure I am older than 13 or something… To satisfy some dumb law I think. The email account is like 15 years old though. How could I be under 13 if it’s that old?
“As Chrome and Gmail will share the urls with Google”.
Chrome and Gmail are Google. You can replace this with “As Google and Google will share urls with Google” without any loss of accuracy.
I think they are specifically saying the apps will share it with the company, but yes, it is very poorly written/ambiguous/seemingly redundant as is. Apps don’t (typically) just send literally everything you do directly to the company.
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.
Yeah just a slight trade-off of sending Google every URL you visit.
The notification to enable enhanced safe browsing even shows up when you’re accessing Gmail on Firefox. It doesn’t even make any damn sense, this feature only works on Chrome. And of course they’ll never add a “don’t show again” option. Think I might just set Gmail to forward to my Proton account from now on.
Edit: found an article on how to forward to ProtonMail in case anyone else wants to know how. Seems very easy to do.
I’ll keep Gmail for any shit I might want to sign up for and use ProtonMail as my serious email account.
Been doing this for a while now.
I go back to Gmail every now and again to check if I’ve missed anything, it’s just a cesspool of junk and spam.
Good to be away from it
I’m actually quite fond of Chrome (don’t shoot me) 😕 Is it “better” to use Chromium?
Simply, yes.
On Android I just started using kiwi browser a month or two ago it’s for android only but it’s chromium based and supports extensions which brings ublock and others to mobile.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kiwibrowser.browser
Thanks for the suggestion!
I had a look, and must admit it sets my spidey sense in something of a tingle 🤔
Their website says “© 2019 - 2021”, and the blog has a single post from 2019. Similarly, the knowledge base has one single post.
Similarly, their GitHub doesn’t seem to have had any changes in the /src project, although this might be because they’ve moved development to /src.next.
Actually, looking at /src.next, there does seem to be a lot of activity, with issues being closed regularly. Maybe it’s just the classic case of devs focusing on dev work and not outward communication or site maintenance.
I’ll give it a go at some point and see how it feels 👍
