Chrome is getting a big privacy and security boost from Google to help safeguard your home network

Google Chrome is getting an upgrade that will help safeguard devices connected to a private or home network.

Google outlined its plans in a post on its Chrome Platform Status page, explaining that the new feature will behave as a monitor for website requests from sites that want to access your private network and ensure that they’re from secure sources.

The more exact reasoning behind the feature, as Google explains in the post, is:

“To prevent malicious websites from pivoting through the user agent’s network position to attack devices and services which reasonably assumed they were unreachable from the Internet at large, by virtue of residing on the user’s local intranet or the user’s machine.”

A woman sits on a bed in a dark room, typing on a laptop

(Image credit: Getty Images)

What we know about the new feature (so far)

The feature will be named ‘Private network access checks for navigation requests’, and it will inspect what source the request to communicate with your private network is coming from – and whether it is secure. On the other end, it will check in with your device to make sure it has permission to access the private network. Developers are currently being assisted by Google to get their websites accredited as secure sources.

This feature hasn’t been assigned to a specific Chrome release yet, according to Neowin, but it’s expected to be packaged into the release of Chrome 123 or 124 for desktop PCs and Android devices. It’s currently in the testing stages and won’t start its vetting processes just yet, unless you’re a developer working with Google on this feature (so your current version of Chrome won’t be able to do this, until the update rolls out to the wider public).