Google Chrome’s focus is the security of its 3 billion users. And now that security is being enhanced with the use of AI to better defend users against “dangerous sites and downloads.” But there’s a catch you need to understand before you switch this on.
As spotted by Leopeva64 on X, “the ‘enhanced protection’ mode in Chrome’s Safe browsing feature will be powered by AI, Google has updated the description of this mode in Canary.” The post includes a before and after picture, showing the subtle change from “proactive protection” to “AI-powered protection.”
The fundamentals haven’t changed though. This “sends the URLs of sites you visit and a small sample of page content, downloads, extension activity, and system information to Google Safe Browsing to check if they’re harmful.” That check is linked to your other Google services if you’re signed in. As such, there’s an obvious privacy compromise with your browsing activity being transmitted and potentially collated.
This contrasts with the imminent AI-powered live threat detection coming to Android before the year-end, which promises to do much the same with apps but limiting that processing to on-device only, specifically for privacy reasons.
There are huge privacy concerns transmitting all your activity off-device. You need to be comfortable with that. It’s not new, it just hasn’t changed and will gain more focus as the on-device versus off-device debate is fueled by cellphone upgrades. What’s unclear is whether this will be same on desktop and mobile versions when released.
The other interesting twist to Google’s latest move is the campaign Microsoft is running to push enterprises to switch their users from Chrome to Edge, specifically because of its safe browsing capabilities to help defend against phishing attacks. It’s unsurprising that Google is enhancing its own offering here. This is currently in the canary development release but should hit the stable release soon.
This focus on enterprise security was emphasized by Parisa Tabriz, Google’s exec responsible for the browser in an interview as part of its Chrome Unboxed series. With the browser “the new endpoint for a lot of enterprises,” the former security engineer explained, “it’s a place where potentially they’re seeing threats or navigating risks and so for IT and security teams, it’s like the best place to either address those threats or really ensure a highly productive workforce.”
While Microsoft is pushing enterprise adoption of Edge seemingly in the hope this will extend to home use, Google is doing this the other way around, with home Chrome users being offered a safer experience in the workplace using the same platform with the right tools and protections for corporate IT to deploy.
What wasn’t mentioned in the interview is the more serious privacy bad news for Chrome users—tracking. The awkward u-turn on cookie deprecation didn’t come up in the interview and remains an ongoing problem for Chrome as it navigates regulatory and industry pressure with its own push for new forms of digital advertising enablement. All against the accelerated backdrop of AI search, which has seen a huge update in the last few weeks with OpenAI’s new threat to Google.
According to AdExhanger, “until recently, you couldn’t swing a cat in ad tech without also hitting someone pontificating about the end of third-party cookies and Privacy Sandbox testing. But since July, when Google announced that deprecation in Chrome is no longer in the cards, there’s been relative silence.”
One ad-tech exec told the site that cookies “went from dominating the discourse to basically nothing… There were companies putting out a ton of marketing: ‘Get ready for Sandbox! Test it! You’ve gotta do it now!’ – and that’s gone to zero. The general sentiment seems to be, ‘Google blinked, so I don’t have to worry about this stuff anymore,’ although no one would ever phrase it that way publicly.”
We expect more clarity on the new opt-in or consensus tracking coming to Chrome and whether this will get regularity buy-in before the end of 2024. Meantime, Chrome remains a secure, speedy browser and this new update strengthens that, notwithstanding unchanged privacy concerns with off-device safe browsing checks.
What we also know—above all—is that none of this seems to impinge at all on Chrome’s user stats. Whatever they’re doing is working and seems unlikely to change.
