When you use Safe Browsing in Shift, you receive warnings that help protect you against malware, abusive sites and extensions, phishing, malicious and intrusive ads, and social engineering attacks.
Safe Browsing crawls and analyzes the web to discover potentially harmful sites and add them to its lists. Each time you visit a website or attempt a download, Shift checks with Safe Browsing based on the protection level you've selected.
Shift builds on top of Google’s Safe Browsing technology with layers of additional security measures to provide enhanced privacy and security:
- Warnings for unsafe, unsecure, or malicious sites
- Scan Avira’s database of unsafe files and known viruses
- Stop unsafe downloads before they save to your computer.
You can choose:
- Standard protection: By default, Standard protection offers security from known dangers.
- No protection (not recommended): You can also turn off Safe Browsing, but you won't be protected against potentially dangerous websites, downloads, and extensions.
You can choose to visit an unsafe site or download a file after you receive a warning from Shift.
About Safe Browsing Standard protection level
Standard protection
When you use Shift, Standard protection is on by default, and you'll receive warnings about sites, downloads, and extensions that have been identified as dangerous.
In order to hide your IP address when you visit a site, Shift sends an obfuscated portion of the URLs you visit through privacy servers before they're forwarded to Shift. Neither Shift nor the third-party operating the privacy server can see both the URL you're visiting and your IP address. Shift checks the obfuscated portion of the URL against Safe Browsing lists and warns you if the site is on one of the lists.
Standard protection sends full URLs and bits of page content to Shift only if a site does something suspicious.
Change your Safe Browsing protection level
- On your computer, open Shift.
- Click the settings icon
to open Quick Settings.
- Click “Advanced Settings”.
- Select the “Privacy and Security” option from the left sidebar.
- Select “Security” from the list of options on the page.
- Select the level of Safe Browsing you want to use.
- Standard protection
- No protection
For a more private and secure browsing experience, you can also review and manage your Advanced security settings.