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Firefox 3 Antiphishing Sends Your URLs To Google

Posted by kdawson on from the clickstream-of-the-world dept.

iritant writes "As we were discussing, Gran Paradiso — the latest version of Firefox — is nearing release. Gran Paradiso includes a form of malware protection that checks every URL against a known list of sites. It does so by sending each URL to Google. In other words, if people enable this feature, they get some malware protection, and Google gets a wealth of information about which sites are popular (or, for that matter, which sites should be checked for malware). Fair deal? Not to worry — the feature is disabled by default."

3 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Not new. by garbletext · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is a non-story. The ability to ask google about phishing has existed since 2.0, and was disabled then as well. Not that telling google every site you visit is a good thing.

  2. Re:Does a master list exist? by 42forty-two42 · · Score: 5, Informative

    By default firefox does not send URLs to google. It downloads a static list from google periodically, and checks against that.

  3. Re:And Google does it again! by LMacG · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ah, you mean the way it already works, then? Good idea!

    --
    Slightly disreputable, albeit gregarious