By banning alert consent requests in Chrome 86, Google has stepped up its campaign against websites that have a history of submitting offensive notification material.
Since the implementation of the quiet notification permission UI in Chrome 80 and the automated enrollment in the quiet notification UI for websites that view hostile notification permission requests beginning with Chrome 84, this is the new move Google has taken in this direction.
The Internet search giant states that such websites provide pages that transmit messages containing links to ransomware or show administrative messages spoofed by the system.
“Google reveals that” If abusive notification material is found on a source, Chrome will automatically display permission requests using a quieter UI.
The compliance targets notification material beginning with Chrome 86 and extends to all pages that are considered to be sending notifications of offensive content.
“This treatment refers to sites that aim to deceive users into granting notification consent for malicious reasons, such as sites that deliver ransomware using web alerts or imitate server messages in order to gain user login credentials,” states Google.
The UI that the user is shown is the one added in Chrome 84.
Through this update, Google notes, Chrome aims to support users who have long complained about abusive notification prompts, as well as to provide an enhanced user interface, thus minimising the risk that the web notification functionality could be misused by pages.
Google’s automatic web crawling programme, if push approval is sought, may occasionally subscribe to website push alerts. Notifications sent to automatic Chrome instances using Secure Browsing technologies will be tested for offensive content, and if the problem is unresolved, pages that send offensive notifications will be flagged for compliance, Google describes.
The Internet giant also explains that Search Console notifies registered site owners and visitors at least 30 calendar days before beginning to implement the quieter user interface alerts on pages that do not comply with notification violation policies, so that site owners can fix the problem.
Site owners should scan the Search Console for the Abusive Alerts Report. A guide on how to correct abusive alerts is also included in the Search Console and helps administrators to order another review of their websites as well.
In the future, for those sites where users might have inadvertently enabled abusive alerts, Chrome will restore the notification permission status to normal. Users, however, will re-activate such alerts.
