Google Chrome and Browser Security

Google Chrome includes features to help protect you and your computer from malicious websites as you browse the web. Chrome uses technologies such as Safe Browsing, sandboxing and auto-updates to help protect you against phishing and malware attacks.

Safe Browsing

Chrome will show you a warning message before you visit a site that is suspected of containing malware or phishing.

A phishing attack takes place when someone masquerades as someone else to trick you into sharing personal or other sensitive information with them, usually through a fake website. Malware, on the other hand, is software installed on your machine, often without your knowledge, and is designed to harm your computer or potentially steal information from your computer.

With Safe Browsing technology enabled in Chrome, if you encounter a website suspected of containing phishing or malware as you browse the web, you will see a warning page like the one below. Learn more about how Safe Browsing works.

Sandboxing

Sandboxing helps prevent malware from installing itself on your computer or using what happens in one browser tab to affect what happens in another. The sandbox adds an additional layer of protection to your browser by protecting against malicious web pages that try to leave programmes on your computer, monitor your web activities or steal private information from your hard drive.

Auto-updates

To make sure that you are protected by the latest security updates, Chrome checks for updates regularly to make sure that it's always kept up to date. The update check ensures that your version of Chrome is updated automatically with the latest security features and fixes without any action required on your part.

To learn more about how you can make full use of Chrome's security features, take a look at the following articles:

• Gathering website security information with Google Chrome
• Tweaking Google Chrome's security settings

Interested in the technical details? Read our blog posts on sandboxing, Safe Browsing and new security features to protect users against threats such as XSS and click-jacking. You can also learn more about security, sandboxing and Safe Browsing in the Chrome comic book.

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Browsers, Google Chrome, Privacy and You

We've built Chrome not only to be faster, but also to put you in control of your private information, while helping protect the information that you share when you're online.

Managing your privacy in Chrome

1. Incognito mode

When you don't want your website visits or downloads to be recorded in your browsing and download histories, you can browse in Incognito mode. In addition, any cookies created while in Incognito mode are deleted after you close the Incognito window.

When you're browsing in Incognito mode, you'll see the Incognito icon  in the corner.

Incognito mode is particularly handy, since it's an easy way to browse the web in a private way without needing to change your privacy settings back and forth between browsing sessions. For example, you can have one normal session, as well as one incognito session, in separate windows at the same time.

2. Privacy preferences

You can control all your privacy preferences for Chrome from the Options dialogue, under the Privacy section, located at the top of the Under the Hood tab.

Learn more about managing your privacy preferences for:

• Suggestions in the Omnibox
• Phishing and malware protection
• Suggestions for navigation errors
• Usage statistics and crash reports

3. Clearing your browsing data

With Chrome, you can clear your browsing data at any time, so that this information is not stored in your browser. You have full control over the types of browsing data that you'd like to erase from your browser, including browsing and download histories, cookies, saved passwords and saved form data. Learn more

4. Controlling privacy preferences for cookies, images, JavaScript and plug-ins

Under Chrome's content settings, you can control your privacy preferences for cookies, images, JavaScript and plug-ins on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up cookie rules to automatically allow cookies only for a specified list of sites that you trust and then manually manage cookie blocking and setting for all other sites. Learn more

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5. Opting out of ad personalisation

Advertisers use cookies to personalise your ads and improve your experience, so that you see ads that interest you. Advertising companies that are members of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) and other self-regulatory effortsallow you to opt out of this personalisation. In Chrome, you can maintain your opt-out status for the browser permanently, even when you clear all cookies by installing the “Keep My Opt-Outs” Chrome extension.

6. Understanding other data sent by the browser

We've taken great care to make sure that Chrome is designed with your privacy in mind. It only communicates with Google services where absolutely necessary to deliver features and functionality. You can disable features that require this kind of communication in Chrome's options, so that you are in control of what is sent to Google when you use Chrome.

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Google’s new Privacy Policy on Google world

Our updated Privacy Policy takes effect today, March 1. As you use our products one thing will be clear: it’s the same Google experience that you’re used to, with the same controls. 

And because we’re making these changes, over time we’ll be able to improve our products in ways that help our users get the most from the web.

While we’ve undertaken the most extensive user education campaign in our history to explain the coming changes, we know there has been a fair amount of chatter and confusion. 

Here are a few important points to bear in mind:

Our Privacy Policy is now much easier to understand.

We’ve included the key parts from more than 60 product-specific notices into our main Google Privacy Policy—so there’s no longer any need to be your own mini search engine if you want to work out what’s going on. Our Privacy Policy now explains, for the vast majority of our services, what data we’re collecting and how we may use it, in plain language.

Our Privacy Policy will enable us to build a better, more intuitive user experience across Google for signed-in users.

If you’re signed in to Google, you expect our products to work really beautifully together. For example, if you’re working on Google Docs and you want to share it with someone on Gmail, you want their email right there ready to use. Our privacy policies have always allowed us to combine information from different products with your account—effectively using your data to provide you with a better service. However, we’ve been restricted in our ability to combine your YouTube and Search histories with other information in your account. Our new Privacy Policy gets rid of those inconsistencies so we can make more of your information available to you when using Google.

So in the future, if you do frequent searches for Jamie Oliver, we could recommend Jamie Oliver videos when you’re looking for recipes on YouTube—or we might suggest ads for his cookbooks when you’re on other Google properties. 

Our privacy controls aren’t changing.

The new policy doesn’t change any existing privacy settings or how any personal information is shared outside of Google. We aren’t collecting any new or additional information about users. We won’t be selling your personal data. And we will continue to employ industry-leading security to keep your information safe.

If you don’t think information sharing will improve your experience, you can use ourprivacy tools to do things like edit or turn off your search history and YouTube history,control the way Google tailors ads to your interests and browse the web “incognito” using Chrome. You can use services like Search, Maps and YouTube if you are not signed in. You can even separate your information into different accounts, since we don’t combine personal information across them. And we’re committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can.

We’ll continue to look for ways to make it simpler for you to understand and control how we use the information you entrust to us. We build Google for you, and we think these changes will make our services even better. 

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Making our ads better for everyone

We believe that ads are useful and relevant information that can help you find what you’re looking for online—whether you’re comparing digital cameras or researching new cars. We also want you to be able to use Google and click on any ads that interest you with confidence. Just as we work hard to make Gmail free of spam and the Google Play Store free of malware, we’re committed to enforcing rigorous standards for the ads that appear on Google and on our partner sites. 

Like all other Internet companies, we’re fighting a war against a huge number of bad actors—from websites selling counterfeit goods and fraudulent tickets to underground international operations trying to spread malware and spyware. We must remain vigilant because scammers will always try to find new ways to abuse our systems. Given the number of searches on Google and the number of legitimate businesses who rely on this system to reach users, our work to remove bad ads must be precise and at scale.

We recently made some improvements to help ensure the ads you see comply with our strict policies, so we wanted to give you an overview of both our principles and these new technologies.

Ads that harm users are not allowed on Google
We’ve always approached our ads system with trust and safety in mind. Ourpolicies cover a wide range of issues across the globe in every country in which we do business. For example, our ads policies don’t allow ads for illegal products such ascounterfeit goods or harmful products such as handguns or cigarettes. We also don’t allow ads with misleading claims (“lose weight guaranteed!”), fraudulent work-at-home scams (“get rich quick working from home!”) or unclear billing practices.

How it all works
With billions of ads submitted to Google every year, we use a combination of sophisticated technology and manual review to detect and remove these sorts of ads. We spend millions of dollars building technical architecture and advanced machine learning models to fight this battle. These systems are designed to detect and remove ads for malicious download sites that contain malware or a virus before these ads could appear on Google. Our automated systems also scan and review landing pages—the websites that people are taken to once they click—as well as advertiser accounts. When potentially objectionable ads are flagged by our automated systems, our policy specialists review the ads, sites and accounts in detail and take action.

Improvements to detection systems
Here are some important improvements that we’ve recently made to our systems:

• Improved “query watch” for counterfeit ads: While anyone can report counterfeit ads, we’ve widened our proactive monitoring of sensitive keywords and queries related to counterfeit goods which allows us to catch more counterfeit ads before they ever appear on Google
• New “risk model” to detect violations: Our computer scanning depends on detailed risk models to determine whether a particular ad may violate our policies, and we recently upgraded our engineering system with a new “risk model” that is even more precise in detecting advertisers who violate our policies
• Faster manual review process: Some ads need to be reviewed manually. To increase our response time in preventing ads from policy-violating advertisers, we sped up our internal processes and systems for manual reviews, enabling our specialists to be more precise and fast
• Twenty-four hour response time: We aim to respond within 24 hours upon receiving a reliable complaint about an ad to ensure that we’re reviewing ads in a timely fashion

We also routinely review and update the areas which our policies cover. For example, we recently updated our policy for ads related to short-term loans in order to protect people from misleading claims. For short-term loans, we require advertisers to disclose fine-print details such as overall fees and annual percentage rate, as well as implications for late and non-payment.

Bad ads are declining 
The numbers show we’re having success. In 2011, advertisers submitted billions of ads to Google, and of those, we disabled more than 130 million ads. And our systems continue to improve—in fact, in 2011 we reduced the percentage of bad ads by more than 50% compared with 2010. That means that our methods are working. We’re also catching the vast majority of these scam ads before they ever appear on Google or on any of our partner networks. For example, in 2011, we shut down approximately 150,000 accounts for attempting to advertise counterfeit goods, and more than 95% of these accounts were discovered through our own detection efforts and risk models.

Here’s David Baker, Engineering Director, who can explain more about how we detect and remove scam ads:



What you can do to help
If you’re an advertiser, we encourage you to review our policies that aim to protect users, so you can help keep the web safe. For everyone else, our Good to Know site has lots of advice, including tips for avoiding scams anywhere on the Internet. You can also report ads you believe to be fraudulent or in violation of our policies and, if needed, file a complaint with the appropriate agency as listed in our Web Search Help Center.

Online advertising is the commercial lifeblood of the web, so it’s vital that people can trust the ads on Google and the Internet overall. We’ll keep posting more information here about our efforts, and developments, in this area.

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Visit the Amazon on World Forest Day with Street View

Last August, a few members of our Brazil and U.S. Street View and Google Earth Outreach teams were invited to the Amazon Basin to collect ground-level images of the rivers, forest and communities in the Rio Negro Reserve. Today, on World Forest Day, we’re making those images available through the Street View feature on Google Maps. Now anyone can experience the beauty and diversity of the Amazon. 

Tributary of the Rio Negro - View Larger Map

Take a virtual boat ride down the main section of the Rio Negro, and float up into thesmaller tributaries where the forest is flooded. Stroll along the paths of Tumbira, the largest community in the Reserve, or visit some of the other communities who invited us to share their lives and cultures. Enjoy a hike along an Amazon forest trail and see where Brazil nuts are harvested. You can even see a forest critter if you look hard enough!

Amazon Rainforest - View Larger Map

This project was made possible in partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), the local nonprofit conservation organization that invited us to the area. We used the Street View trike and a tripod camera with a fisheye lens—typically used to capture imagery of business interiors—to capture both the natural landscape and the local communities. In all, more than 50,000 still photos were stitched together to create these immersive, 360-degree panoramic views:


This project was made possible in partnership with the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), the local nonprofit conservation organization that invited us to the area. We used the Street View trike and a tripod camera with a fisheye lens—typically used to capture imagery of business interiors—to capture both the natural landscape and the local communities. In all, more than 50,000 still photos were stitched together to create these immersive, 360-degree panoramic views:

Many areas of the Amazon, including Rio Negro Reserve, are under the protection of the Brazilian government with restricted access to the public, so we hope that this Street View collection provides access to this special corner of the planet that many of us otherwise wouldn’t have the chance to experience. Together with FAS, we’re thrilled to help everyone from researchers and scientists to armchair explorers around the world learn more about the Amazon, and better understand how local communities there are working to preserve this unique environment for future generations.

To do this directly from maps you can go to Brazil map and drag Pegman to the Rio Negro River

Start exploring this portion of the Amazon and other collections around the world on the updated Street View site and gallery.

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Google Chrome and Speed

There are many aspects to speed in the browser, and Chrome is designed to be fast and responsive in every possible way. To get a sense of Chrome's speed, watch these browser speed test videos:

1. Fast to start up

Chrome launches from your desktop within seconds when you double-click the Chrome icon.

2. Fast to load web pages

Chrome is powered by the WebKit open source rendering engine, and loads web pages in a snap.

3. Fast to run web applications

Under the hood, Chrome is fitted with V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine that we built to run complex web applications with lightning speed. With every new release, Chrome continues to improve in JavaScript performance. You can test JavaScript speed in the browser with the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks.

Chrome users will also enjoy fast, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. To test this out in the latest version of Chrome, check out chromeexperiments.com/webgl

As web applications we use every day become more dynamic, browsers need to be able to construct and change elements on web pages as quickly as possible. This ability is measured by Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests. Just like JavaScript performance, Chrome continues to improve DOM Core performance scores with every new release.

4. Fast to search and navigate

You can type in both searches and web addresses in Chrome's combined search and address bar, known as the Omnibox.
The Omnibox provides suggestions for searches and web addresses as you type, as well as auto-completion functionality to help you get to what you're looking for with just a few keystrokes.

You can also enable Chrome’s Instant feature, which helps you search and browse faster on the web. Chrome’s Instant feature shows search results and webpages in the browser window as you type in the Omnibox, even before you press Enter. If you don't see the results you want, you can just keep typing and the results dynamically update. 

Curious about the technical details of what makes Chrome fast?

Read more about WebKit, V8 JavaScript engine, and browser speed in the Chrome comic book.
Watch technical videos on what makes Chrome fast, namely on DNS pre-resolution, V8 JavaScript engine, and DOM bindings.

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Google world Advices Chrome Web Store

Chrome Web Store

The Chrome Web Store is an online marketplace where you can discover thousands of apps, extensions andthemes for Google Chrome. To start exploring the store, visit chrome.google.com/webstore or click the store icon in Chrome’s New Tab page.

Explore what’s in the store

Apps

Web apps are advanced interactive websites. They may provide a wide-ranging set of features or focus on a single task like photo-editing or shopping. You can easily access the web apps you install from the Chrome Web Store through shortcuts in Chrome’s New Tab page. Learn more about installing apps in Chrome.

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* Apps are currently not available in all countries. We are working hard on launching apps everywhere in the world. Stay tuned!

Extensions

Extensions let you add new features to your browser. For example, an email notifier extension can show an email alert in your browser toolbar so you don’t have to log in to your email in a separate window to check if you have new messages. There are also extensions that work silently in the background, such as an extension that automatically formats and displays web pages in your preferred style. Learn more about installing extensions in Chrome.

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Themes

Themes allow you to you customize the look and feel of your browser, including themes from leading artists and designers around the world. Learn more about adding a theme to the browser.

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