Google Will Take Action Against Websites That Abuse Its Notification System

Remember those annoying ads that keep popping up whenever you go to your favourite website and irritate the hell out of you. Well, looks like Google has finally taken notice.

In a recent blog post by the tech giant explains its new efforts to be against “abusive patterns” which are “used to mislead users, phish for private information or promote malware.”

Google is planning to launch the anti-abusive notification system on July 14th, along with the release of Chrome 84 which will further ensure that the leading search engine’s own browser is soon going to be able to list websites automatically that may have abusive permission notifications right in the quite notifications section. This will eventually help users in getting to know if the website has misleading information.

Moreover, while explaining the notifications in detail, PJ McLachlan, Web Platform Product Manager for Chrome further said that permission requests are primarily designed to trick users into making them allow notifications A great example of such a site can be the one that asks the user to click on agree to get notifications in order to gain access to the content available on the site or the ones that show misleading pre-prompts.

The new tool can only work on upcoming abusive notifications and it won’t be able to provide protection to users who may have already given permission to sites with abusive notifications. However, Google says that they are also currently working on offering protection to the ones who are already struggling with abusive notifications.

The owners of websites that currently have abusive notifications will get an email at least 30 days before the implementation of this system to make sure that they fix the user experience of their site for visitors. There is also an official guide by Google on how to fix the abusive notifications and then submit your site for another review.

Google is also planning to bring back the SameSite cookie update in Chrome 84 with the intention to let users also manage the cookies according to their choices.

Currently, Chrome accepts cookies by default, but with SameSite in place Chrome might just be able to block cookies from functioning which might have third-party links (with exceptions for the ones that have specific labels). All this is getting done to limit how cookies and websites are collecting user data.