Safe Browsing collects a lot of data, such as hashes of URLs (URLs can be easily decoded by comparison) and probably other interactions with web like downloads.
But how effective is it in malware detection?
The benefits seem to me dubious. It looks like a feature offered to collect browsing data, useful to maybe 1% in special situations.
It's the only thing that has reasonable coverage to effectively block a phishing attack or malware distribution. It can certainly do other things like collecting browsing data, but it does get rid of long-lasting persistent garbage hosted at some bulletproof hosts.
100% agreed. Adblock does this better and doesn’t randomly block image sharing websites