Google’s had an Enhanced Safe Browsing feature in Chrome since 2019—a set of privacy features to help protect against phishing and malware attacks. Basically, if a link doesn’t seem quite right, Google will warn you about it. Recently, they finally brought the feature directly into Gmail.
Here’s how Enhanced Safe Browsing mode works
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Enhanced Safe Browsing checks the links and attachments in your Gmail account with its own database of known scam links, where a website pretends to be real to steal your personal information (also known as phishing). Google has a massive database of such bad actors, and it’s updated every 30 minutes. Once the feature is enabled, Gmail will scan incoming emails and attachment downloads against that database and warn you if something looks suspicious.
How to enable Enhanced Safe Browsing on Gmail
If you’re already logged in to your Google account, simply open this link in a new tab and enable the Enhanced Safe Browsing feature from there. Alternatively, you can open your Google Account page and go to Security > Manage Enhanced Safe Browsing.
When you enable this feature in your Google account, it will be enabled across other Google products as well, like Chrome. And in Chrome, this feature extends to Chrome extensions and file downloads.
The downsides of using Enhanced Safe Browsing
The only big downside to using Enhanced Safe Browsing is the sheer amount of personal data that Google will be able to access. It’ll be able to check all the links that come through your Gmail account, and if you use Chrome, that includes links clicked, files downloaded, and extensions installed.
Of course, Google says this data is used only to improve your data security when you’re logged in, and after a short time, the data is fully anonymized. But anonymizing data isn’t perfect—it can still be linked to social media profiles, as one Princeton study illustrates.
If you’re okay with that potential risk, go ahead and enable the feature. It might also be worth recommending to others in your life too, if you think they’re the type of user particularly susceptible to things like phishing scams and malware attacks.
[ZDNET, CNET]