What is the “Safety Tips” component present on chrome://components?

Question

I'm worried about a component I've seen on my chrome://components list. It's name is Safety Tips (see the Image description here).

Is it malware or a virus of any kind? How do I uninstall it?

My operating System is Ubuntu Mate 18.04

Answer 1

Safety Tips seems to be a work in progress that will give warnings for the current page, as well as gather some data about downloads from the page. It seems that it will not be available for all webpages.

The only way for the moment to get a glimpse of what it will do, is by reading Chromium bug reports for this component.

Issue 984725: Implement client-side heuristics for Safety Tips

Safety Tips: add lookalike heuristic checking.

This CL adds lookalike heuristic checking to safety tips. A safety tip is only triggered when a lookalike domain is identified, but an interstitial would NOT be triggered. In practice, this means a safety tip is triggered when:

• there's an edit distance of 1 to a top or engaged domain, or
• there's skeleton similarity to a non-top-500 top domain.

My guess that this a metric to detect domain names that are very similar to well-known sites, perhaps meaning fake websites spoofing real ones.

Issue 987754: Implement Safety Tip metrics

Metrics we want:

• Downloads started
• Forms submitted
• Page Info interactions
• Navigation metrics (# of page loads, navigations to/from safety tip pages, time spent on safety tip pages)
• Site Engagement metrics (current SE score when loading a safety tip page, change in SE)

This seems to be metrics to judge the effectiveness of Safety Tips displayed information on user actions. Seems to be pretty invasive.