Enhanced Safe Browsing has been a part of desktop Chrome for quite some time and we had also mentioned it in our article on how to enhance Google Chrome security. And, after many months, Google has brought this advanced security feature on Android. According to Google, Enhanced Safe Browsing on Chrome minimizes security threats by 20% on the desktop and 25% on Android which is a significant number. So if you want to enable Enhanced Safe Browsing on Chrome for Android then follow along. But before that, let’s find out what exactly is Enhanced Safe Browsing.
To protect users on the web, Google maintains something called a Safe Browsing blocklist. It contains a list of website URLs that are unsafe and potentially harmful. Google updates this list every 30 minutes and Chrome on your desktop or smartphone fetches this list locally after every 30-min time window.
The only issue with this approach is that Google has to send the URL to its servers to check them and the data is temporarily linked to your Google account (in standard practice, browsing data are anonymized). Google says that it’s done to protect you across various Google services such as Google Drive, Gmail, Google Photos, and more.
For some privacy-conscious users, it may look like another data-gathering exercise by Google but that’s your own volition whether you want to temporarily hand over your browsing data to Google. In my opinion, for elderly users who don’t have an idea about the dark side of the web, turning Enhanced Safe Browsing would be a very good option.
- First of all, update Chrome to the latest version from the Play Store. In case, you have not got an update then you can sideload the latest Chrome from APKMirror (Free). For your information, you should be on Chrome 86.0.4240.114 and above to be able to access Enhanced Safe Browsing.
