When you use Google Safe Browsing in Chrome, you receive warnings that help protect you against malware, abusive sites and extensions, phishing, malicious and intrusive ads, and social engineering attacks.
Safe Browsing crawls and analyzes the web to discover potentially harmful sites and add them to its lists. Each time you visit a website or attempt a download, Chrome checks with Safe Browsing based on the protection level you've selected.
You can choose:
- Enhanced protection: Google’s most secure browsing experience, Enhanced protection offers security from known and potential new dangers.
- Standard protection: By default, Standard protection offers security from known dangers.
- No protection (not recommended): You can also turn off Safe Browsing, but you won't be protected against potentially dangerous websites, downloads, and extensions. Your Safe Browsing setting in other Google products won’t be affected.
You can choose to visit an unsafe site or download a file after you receive a warning from Chrome.
About Safe Browsing protection levels
Enhanced protectionWhen you turn on Enhanced protection, you'll receive warnings about potentially dangerous sites, downloads, and extensions, even ones Google didn’t previously know about.
When you visit a site, Chrome sends the URL of the site and a small sample of page content, extension activity, and system information to Google Safe Browsing to check if they’re potentially harmful, including in-depth scans of suspicious downloads. Info sent to Google Safe Browsing is only used for security purposes.
If you’re signed in to your Google Account, Safe Browsing protection extends across your Google services by saving this data to your Google Account — for example, Safe Browsing can increase protection in Gmail after a security incident.
Enhanced protection:
- Improves security for you and everyone on the web.
- Warns you if you use a password that's been compromised in a data breach.
- Doesn’t noticeably slow down your browser or device.
When you use Chrome, Standard protection is on by default, and you'll receive warnings about sites, downloads, and extensions that have been identified as dangerous.
In order to hide your IP address when you visit a site, Chrome sends an obfuscated portion of the URLs you visit through privacy servers before they're forwarded to Google. Neither Google nor the third-party operating the privacy server can see both the URL you're visiting and your IP address. Google checks the obfuscated portion of the URL against Safe Browsing lists and warns you if the site is on one of the lists.
Standard protection:
- Sends full URLs and bits of page content to Google only if a site does something suspicious.
- Provides an option to help improve security for you and everyone on the web.
- Provides an option to warn you if you use a password that's been compromised in a data breach.
Change your Safe Browsing protection level
- On your computer, open Chrome.
- At the top right, select More
Settings.
- On the left, select Privacy and security
Security.
- Select the level of "Safe Browsing" you want to use.
- Enhanced protection
- Standard protection
- No protection
For a more private and secure browsing experience, you can also review and manage your Advanced security settings. Learn how to manage additional Chrome security settings.