Google is providing loads of resources in order to help us stay safe while we are surfing on the Internet with various measures like Safe Browsing for Chrome. They have recently introduced an improved version of this tool. For the desktop it has been already widely available and now it is slowly rolling out on Android. Now if you need to grab Enhanced Safe Browsing there are two flags that will bring it to you.
In order to get access to the brand new security feature you need to go to chrome://flags and search for “safe browsing”. You are required to activate these two flags:
chrome://flags/#safe-browsing-security-section-ui-android
chrome://flags/#safe-browsing-enhanced-protection-android
once it is enabled you are required to go to settings and then look for the new Privacy and security section replacing the Privacy only entry of old. Here you will find a new Safe Browsing UI that allows you to select between standard and improved protection. Just like the current stable desktop version you can select your preferred level right here but you can also tap the arrow next to both the entries in order to learn more about the options.
The enhanced protection will have more proactive features. The standard version just checks the URLs with a pre-created list of all the sites which are unsafe and they are updated regularly. The new mode sends the unknown URLs to Google’s servers in order to test them in real time. It helps you protect from the sites that instantly change their addresses in order to evade the company’s other protection measures. If you are signed in, the data is saved to your Google account temporarily in order to fight against possible parallel phishing attacks on other devices or services. Google says the new measure increases the security by about 20% on the desktops and 25% on mobile. The only difference between standard and improved protection you will see is lack of sharing option for latter when you will hit any malicious site. That is all because you agree to send the suspicious links to Google by default so there is no need for an option asking you to do as much.