Meta has provided a new overview of how its Safe Browsing feature in Messenger works to protect users from clicking on dangerous links included within DMs. The safety features are designed to limit the impact of spam and scam behavior in the messaging app.
It’s an important initiative. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, internet scam activity has continued to rise year over year, with losses from online fraud between 2020 and 2024 reaching more than $50 billion in the U.S. n In 2024 alone, Americans lost more than $16 billion to online scams.
Due to the company’s massive reach, Meta’s apps are a key focus for anti-scam efforts, which is why it’s important for Meta, in particular, to offer more protection where it can.
Safe Browsing in Messenger, which Meta launched last October, implements warnings of potentially malicious links within end-to-end encrypted messages and calls.
That, ideally, will help limit the reach of potential scams. Meta has also worked to expand its in-stream safety alerts and measures to guard against this.
As per Meta, standard Safe Browsing uses on-device models to analyze malicious links shared in chats, but it’s now expanded this with a new setting called Advanced Browsing Protection that “leverages a continually updated watchlist of millions more potentially malicious websites.”
That means that the safe browsing tools cannot all live on the users’ device, given the breadth of this additional data and the need for constant updates to the database. Because of this, Meta’s engineers had to come up with new, privacy-protecting ways to expand the database, while also limiting exposure within individual devices and applications.
Meta’s advanced process now uses a combination of on-device and external database retrieval elements to ensure the information is always up to date, while also maintaining separation between individuals and its servers. The end result is a more robust security system, which offers more protection across a wider range of suspicious domains. That means Messenger users will be alerted to potential threats before they click.
It could be a valuable addition, with that initial link friction giving Messenger users a moment to consider before they allow access.
