No More Notifications

Finally! Blocking disruptive notifications is coming to Google Chrome.

When your surfing the web it can become overwhelming with the number of notifications that people want us to see. There are the policies to accept for cookies and tracking, but then there are the permissions for them to send notifications whilst we are on the website. Most of these are harmless, News Updates, Latest releases etc, but they are becoming spam.

They are distracting, make people less productive at work as well as being really annoying. They can also be malicious in intent in some cases. ‘Notification Spam’, as it is known, is becoming a problem, and Google has said its one of the top complaints reported by the users of tis browser. So the Tech Giant has taken the decision to act.

Google First took action in October 2020 on harmful notifications, by highlighting websites that tricked or misled users into giving permission. designed and put in place its own prompts to warn users that the website may have harmful content.

But now, they are going to take more action, with further steps put in place if it feels a website is ‘abusive’ or disruptive’. Google will remove the website’s permission to send notifications, and block any attempt to request permissions. What happens if you accidentally approve notifications? Well Google Chrome will step in to protect you, by blocking the alerts.

Its not fully clear how Google is going to define websites as ‘disruptive’ or ‘abusive’, but it feels like a massive step forward in reducing the amount of spam we are exposed to.

The new feature works to strengthen Google’s ‘Developer Terms of Service’, that pledge not to use the Company’s API to send any form of Spam.  It shouldn’t affect the majority of websites, but instead should go some way to keeping you spam free when using Chrome.

If you would like more information on protecting yourself from Spam, malicious content or productivity killers. Please get in touch.