Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Chrome will start automatically revoking notification permission for sites you don’t regularly interact with.
- This move follows similar steps for revoking camera and location permissions.
- Users can always re-allow notifications, or turn the feature off entirely.
Notifications are such a double-edged sword. While tactfully deployed notifications are wonderful, keeping us informed about the things we care about most, it is far too easy to get carried away there, and once we ruin that signal-to-noise ratio with too many unwanted notifications, they all start becoming a lot less useful. Thankfully, developers are aware of the risks here, and have been working to develop systems designed to help us regain control and keep our notifications as beneficial as possible.
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You’ve probably seen Android let you know about permissions it’s revoking from an app you haven’t used in a while. Google introduced that system back with Android 11, and it makes a lot of sense — software you’re no longer interacting with could present a security or privacy risk, so why not just cut off its access if it’s not being used?
Google’s Chrome browser has a trick like that, too, and this time last year we learned how its Safety Check feature could detect when you’d stopped visiting a site so often, and automatically revoke permissions for things like camera, microphone, and location access.
While at the time we also learned about some new Chrome features for notifications, like automatic spam detection, this kind of auto-revocation for infrequently visited sites did not extend to notifications. But now, that’s finally changing.
Google shares that Chrome on Android and desktop alike will now start revoking notification permissions from websites you’re no longer interacting with. This only applies to regular sites, not any installed web apps, and the browser will tell you when it’s doing so, saving you from any surprises.
Ideally, that all works with minimal interaction from you, but if you feel like Chrome got something wrong, and you want to keep receiving notifications from a certain site, you can always choose to reenable them. And if this just isn’t working out for you at all, you can turn the tool off altogether.
Still, it sounds like many of us could benefit from an easy way like this to cut down on a lot of the unnecessary notification chatter, and make sure our attention’s focused on those that really matter most.
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