4 ms·
Wait, Apple is Sending URLs to Google ?
by mulle_nat 7y ago
Wait, Apple is Sending URLs to Google ?
- slenk 7y agoI think a lot of browsers do for the "Safe Browsing" checks
- phyzome 7y agoFirefox downloads a big blob of unsafe URLs and checks against that, last I saw.
- sanxiyn 7y agoNo, Firefox uses the exactly same Safe Browsing protocol. In fact, the protocol was co-developed by Google and Mozilla.
- phyzome 7y agoInteresting. I do remember people complaining about a large file in Firefox profiles, in the context of multi-user host admins wanting to be able to have it in a centrally managed location rather than replicated to every profile. I recall it being a sizable sqlite DB for Safe Browsing. I wonder what that was about, then.
- teraflop 7y agoThe Safe Browsing API is deliberately designed to avoid leaking the contents of URLs to Google. You can read about how it works here: https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/update-api https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4/update-api
- xenophonf 7y agoIt's designed to avoid leaking URLs, but I'd be a lot more comfortable if Safe Browsing worked by downloading a list of hashes to my computer and checking locally. That way, data never leaves my device.
- tialaramex 7y agoThat means giving you all the hashes, which is a lot of data, and you'd need to constantly update it because the whole point of Safe Browsing is the dynamism. Whereas today your browser only needs the prefix list, which is much shorter and so can feasibly be updated more often without awful bandwidth costs. The full hashes in a prefix are only fetched (which is where we get "Apple is sending URLs" by squinting really hard at the facts) if you visit a URL with a hash with a known-bad prefix.
- innagadadavida 7y agoJust elaborating on the method google uses here. The client sends a hash prefix of the url if there is a match in the local db. The server then sends back full url hashes. Other than your IP address, there is not much data that can be collected here.
- kzrdude 7y agoDefault configuration of Chrome sends whatever you type, while you are typing it, in the location bar to Google. And Firefox can do that too, no idea what their default configuration is.
- noisem4ker 7y agoIf I remember right, Firefox asks if you want to enable search suggestions right where they would appear, in the drop-down menu.
- icebraining 7y agoIn Firefox, search suggestions are only enabled by the default in the Search field, not in the URL bar.