Where deceptive-site protection reasons about how a domain name looks, Safe Browsing checks it against public lists of domains already reported for phishing or malware. Vodou does this without the usual privacy cost of "safe browsing" features: the mainstream approach sends every URL you visit to a server for a verdict, which is effectively a browsing log. Vodou never does that.

How it works

The lists are downloaded and held in memory, and each navigation is checked locally — no URL, hash, or hash prefix ever leaves your machine. The only network activity is an anonymous, periodic download of the public lists themselves (at startup and every 12 hours), the same kind of request as Vodou's version check. The merged list is cached at ~/.vodou/safebrowsing.dat.

Honest limits: this check is domain-level, not per-URL — a malicious path on an otherwise clean host isn't caught — and the lists are only periodically refreshed, so a brand-new phishing domain can slip through until the next update.

Turning it on or off

☰ → Settings → Privacy & security → Safe Browsing (on by default). Safe Browsing status… shows how many hosts are loaded and when the list was last updated. To point it at different sources, list URLs in ~/.vodou/safebrowsing_sources.txt, or add your own hosts to ~/.vodou/safebrowsing_extra.txt.