When you are browsing it often feels like you are being bombarded with things others want you to see.
Not only do we have to click on permissions for cookies and tracking, but now a lot of websites ask for our permission to send us notifications.
While many of these notifications are harmless – news updates, latest recipes, product releases, etc – sometimes they can be outright spam.
It is distracting, it is making us less productive at work, and it is really annoying.
This is called ‘notification spam’ and it is fast becoming a problem. Google actually says it is one of the top complaint reports from people using its Chrome browser.
Now the tech giant is taking action and is going to be doing something about it.
Google first acted on harmful notifications back in October 2020. They did this by exposing websites that misled people into giving permission. It created its own prompts to warn people the website may have malicious intent.
Google now intends to take things a step further. If it feels the website is “abusive” or “disruptive” it will revoke its permission to send notifications, and even block attempts to request permission.
Even if you have accidentally allowed a malicious site to send notifications, Chrome will be able to step in and block the alerts.
While it is not yet clear how Google will define websites as “abusive” or “disruptive”, it feels like a move in the right direction towards reducing the amount of spam we are exposed to.
Google has explained that this new feature works to strengthen its ‘Developer Terms of Service” that pledge not to use the company’s API to send any form of spam. It should not affect the majority of websites, but instead should go some way to keeping your Chrome notifications spam-free.
Unfortunately we don’t yet have a release date for the Chrome’s notification spam block protection as development has only just started.
As always, if you would like any further advice on protecting yourself from spam and other productivity killers, get in touch.
