A Privacy Analysis of Google and Yandex Safe Browsing
Abstract
Google and Yandex Safe Browsing are popular services included in many web
browsers to prevent users from visiting phishing or malware website links. If Safe Browsing services
protect their users from losing private information, they also require that their servers receive
browsing information on the very same users. In this paper, we present an analysis of Google
and Yandex Safe Browsing services from a privacy perspective. We quantify the privacy provided
by these services by analyzing the possibility of re-identifying a URL visited by a client. We
hence challenge Google’s privacy policies where they claim that Google can not recover URLs
visited by its users. Our analysis and experimental results show that Google and Yandex Safe
Browsing can potentially be used as a tool to track specific classes of individuals. Additionally, our
investigations on the data currently included in Yandex Safe Browsing provides a concrete set of
URLs/domains that can be re-identified without much effort.
Origin | Files produced by the author(s) |
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