Chrome can now share your clipboard data with Google servers (for your own good)

Google introduced Enhanced Protection in Chrome over half a decade ago. Since then, the company has added several new tools to identify increasingly sophisticated online threats and protect Chrome users from them. Now, Google is introducing three new features in Enhanced Safe Browsing Protection to combat web scams and further protect users.

Google Chrome now takes a two-tiered approach to site safety warnings, displaying either a suspicious website pop-up or a full-screen dangerous site warning. When a Chrome user navigates to a website displaying known deceptive patterns, Chrome will show a new suspicious website pop-up informing the user that the site might not be safe.

The user can then choose to return to a safe page or mark the website as safe if they are confident it is not malicious. Meanwhile, dangerous site warnings will continue to appear as a full-page interstitial on webpages known to be malicious and pose a high risk of harm.

Google Chrome’s on-device Gemini-powered scam detection feature is also getting an upgrade. The browser will switch to a more powerful, server-side Gemini model, allowing it to protect users from a broader range of scams, including tech support, fake antivirus, and browser update scams.

While on-device Gemini protection resulted in issues like that weights.bin file that users assumed was malware, the new server-side Gemini model may instead raise privacy concerns among users. For what it’s worth, Google states that it minimizes the amount of data shared with the server by analyzing page text only when a website displays “high-confidence scam indicators.” It also states that data sent off-device for Gemini analysis is never logged, retained, or used for AI training.

Chrome is also gaining a new capability to protect users against tactics like the ClickFix social engineering scam. ClickFix tricks users into copying malicious commands and manually running them on their computers. Though the command displayed by the webpage can look innocuous, the actual command copied by the user is often different and malicious.

Chrome will now detect if a user has been tricked into copying a suspicious command, and will send the clipboard data to Safe Browsing servers for analysis. If the server finds that the command is dangerous, Chrome will display a warning to prevent the user from executing it on their computer. Sharing clipboard data with a server also raises privacy questions, but Google states that Chrome will strip any personally identifiable information from the clipboard before sharing the data with Safe Browsing servers.

These new Enhanced Protection features are already available in Chrome. You can turn on Enhanced Protection directly from Chrome’s Safe Browsing settings.