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Comment by rodlette | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially... I try to not use any third parties that say what I can/cannot see. That includes SafeBrowsing, which I disable via...

  browser.safebrowsing.blockedURIs.enabled
  browser.safebrowsing.downloads.enabled
  browser.safebrowsing.downloads.remote.enabled
  browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled
  browser.safebrowsing.passwords.enabled
  browser.safebrowsing.phishing.enabled

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Odd stance. SafeBrowsing does not _ban_ you from viewing content if you really want to. It only warns you before serving you the content.

I understand maybe wanting "total control" over your own devices, but to just completely reject security warnings seems like a net negative overall.

Why send every url you visit (or its hash, whatever) to google in return for little to no tangible benefit? I've never used safebrowsing at any point since its introduction and have yet to encounter a single instance where I would have benefitted had I been using it.

Chrome uses a local bloom filter of bad URLs for precisely that reason.

Firefox downloads a list regularly, it doesn't send URLs of every visit to Google https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...

"It would be too slow (and privacy-invasive) to contact a trusted server every time the browser wants to establish a connection with a web server. Instead, Firefox downloads a list of bad URLs every 30 minutes from the server (browser.safebrowsing.provider.google.updateURL) and does a lookup against its local database before displaying a page to the user."

See https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2019/10/13/dear-app... for a critique of the privacy of Safe Browsing.

Though it's enabled by default, I consider the burden of proof to be to advocate for its utility. Would I opt into this if it was disabled by default?

It has some utility, and some costs: traffic noise, some privacy leak, system complexity, centralization.

On balance it's not for me so I disabled it.

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