Like it or not, AI is everywhere.
AI has the ability to perform tasks that humans can't, often doing them faster and more efficiently. By analyzing vast amounts of data, it continuously improves and becomes increasingly intelligent. Additionally, especially for Google, users of Chrome can trust AI more than they trust humans.
At least in terms of preserving their security when browsing the web.
"AI is already used across Chrome in performance, productivity, accessibility, privacy, and security. Now generative AI features will make it even easier and more efficient to browse — all while keeping your experience personalized to you," said Google on a dedicated page about Chrome.
But going to more details, Google has quietly updated one of Chrome’s security features called Enhanced Protection.
Here, Google is enhancing it with some AI magic.
And the results should make the web browser safer, if users can trust Google more than they already have.
It’s a big web out there — explore fearlessly
With help from Google AI, Chrome warns you in real-time when you encounter dangerous sites, files, and extensions.
Learn how Chrome uses Google AI to ensure you’re safe online: https://t.co/okPs7HUSro— Chrome (@googlechrome) November 13, 2024
Google Chrome's Enhanced Protection is a security feature designed to provide a higher level of protection while browsing the internet.
It works by using advanced algorithms to identify and block dangerous websites, phishing attempts, and malicious downloads.
Enhanced Protection is part of Chrome’s broader security system, which aims to protect users from online threats in real-time.
When enabled, this feature sends browsing data to Google to help identify new threats and improve the safety of Chrome users. The data includes things like information about the websites users visit, downloads, and interactions with potentially dangerous content, but Google claims this data is anonymized to protect privacy.
Enhanced Protection also ensures that Chrome's Safe Browsing service is updated more frequently, so users are protected against the latest security risks.
While it can proactively secure users, there are cases that the algorithms failed in identifying threats. In other cases, false positives also happened.
But with AI, Google wants to take a bigger part in scanning on a deeper level with more downloads and better protection across all of Google’s services.
Chrome can do this because with AI, Chrome is less reliant on a periodically updated list stored on users' device to identify threats.
Google discovered that the average lifespan of a malicious site is less than 10 minutes, which made the old system less effective. The new real-time protection not only checks sites against a constantly updated server-side list of known dangerous sites, but also learns from patterns that malicious activities often make.
Long story short, what Google is doing here, is using AI to provide stronger security, with greater potential than before.
However, Google can only do this when users have signed in to their Google account.
What this means, users are required to send more data to Google, or at least have more of their data analyzed by Google, either locally or through its servers.
This in turn may increase data collection.
Knowing that Google is always hungry for user data, and that it's known for using user data to create targeted ads, the option to send even more data to Google can be a turn off to some privacy-concerned users.