Finally! Disruptive notifications are going to be blocked by Chrome

Disruptive notifications & their impact

When you’re surfing the internet, it has become increasingly common for you to be interrupted with disruptive notifications you don’t even remember signing up to see. Whether it’s at a critical moment in the working day or whilst you’re catching up on the latest episode of your favourite series, a random notification popping up on the screen is enough to distract you from the task at hand.

With the majority of websites instantly gaining our permission for cookies and tracking, It has now become increasingly common for websites to ask us our permission to send us notifications.

Whilst some of these notifications provide us with relevant information that we may occasionally want to see, such as news updates or new product releases. More often than not, they can feel like spam. The constant flurry of notifications we receive from the website is enough to put us off entirely.

It is something as simple as these disrupting notifications which can impact our productivity levels at work. Not only can this have implications on an employee’s workload, but it can also provide them with feelings of frustration.

According to Google, one of their top complaints from people who use the browser is to do with spam notifications.

Google Chrome have now decided it’s time to take further action…

Preventing disruptive notifications – making a change

In October 2020, Google first touched on the subject.

Websites that provided misleading notifications, that potentially could be of harm, were exposed. This was in the hopes that other websites would be warned to avoid making the same mistake. It helped other domains to see that there would be negative implications for partaking in these sorts of activities.

Preventing disruptive notifications – the next steps

Google now have the intention to take these changes to the next level. If it feels as if a websites notifications are beyond advertisement and engagement purposes and has a disruptive intent, they will take further action. They intend to completely prevent a website from sending its users notifications. Additionally, Google may take the opportunity to block the websites’ ability to request the users’ permission of notifications, when they are breaching these regulations.

Even if you find yourself in the situation where you have accidentally allowed a site with an abusive intent to push notifications to you, Chrome now have the ability to take a step in and prevent these harmful notifications.

While it’s not yet clear how Google will define websites as ‘abusive’ or ‘disruptive’, it feels like a good move towards reducing the amount of spam we’re exposed to.

This new feature that Google Chrome is intending to implement, is to align with its ‘Developer Terms of Service.’ Chrome will be able to strengthen these terms of services that pledge not to use the company’s API to release any form of spam. Whilst it won’t affect the majority of websites, what it will do is ensure that the notifications you receive off Chrome are free from spam.

When will we see this new feature be available?

Whilst this implementation of spam block protection does not have a direct release date, it is the beginning of a journey that has only just started and there is a long way to go.

Advice

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