Firefox 3 Antiphishing Sends Your URLs To Google

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."

Comments

Re:And Google does it again!

[Zaatxe]

Here in Brazil, Petrobras gasoline stations have the brand BR over a green and yellow pair of stripes. And then somebody had the idea of branding their gasoline stations 13R, using a font almost impossible to tell the differrence between BR and 13R. And of course this 13R stations sell very low quality fuel...

But you don't need to believe me, you can believe your own eyes. This is the 13R station and This is a real BR station.

Re:Does a master list exist?

[elyk]

In firefox 2.0, if you look in preferences > security, there are two options for antiphishing. One is the "use a downloaded list" option, and the other is the "check by asking google for each site I visit". But the word google is a dropdown box - it appears that there will eventually be more choices, but they haven't made deals with (or been offered money from, depending on how cynical you are) other providers yet.