Heads Up: Get Ready for Customers Reporting Blocked "Unsafe" Downloads

[SussexSeamstress]

I have a website as well as my Etsy shop and some of our products are digital downloads. Since yesterday I've had customers telling me that downloads from our website are being blocked and flagged as "dangerous" or malicious; these are the exact same files we sell on Etsy...

After some digging it seems that Google Chrome (and potentially some other browsers), have started blocking downloads of ".zip" files when the browser is in the default "safe browsing" mode. It seems likely that this will affect digital products on Etsy as well. So if you start seeing customers reporting that their downloads are being blocked & reported as "dangerous" or "malicious", this is why!

And don't think you'll be ok if you are not selling zip files - future planned Chrome updates are extending this behaviour to a whole bunch of popular files types. Next up are PDF's and MS Word (.docx) files, among others, which will likely affect far more Etsy sellers. The update after that will even target image files like PNG etc.

Basically, almost any digital download is going to be blocked by default when users are in the default "safe browsing" mode and users are being informed that these files are "dangerous".

This is going to be a customer support nightmare (as I'm already experiencing).

[CryzalisDesigns]

I purchased files from Etsy just yesterday and have "safe browsing" mode turned on in addition to additional securities and had no issues come up with a large zip file. 

[SussexSeamstress]

Sorry, I should have updated this. Although it's still true that these measures are being taken by Google, and they are intended to catch malicious downloads, it turned out that the issues I was experiencing were being caused by an unintended bug in Google Chrome that was causing the warning messages to trigger when unintentionally, which Google have now fixed (it took a while!). However, not everyone updates their web browser frequently, so I still occasionally get customers reporting this kind of issue. It was never something that 100% of people experienced, so I appreciate that some people may try this and say "what are you talking about, it's fine", as that was the case already for lots of people. This was just a heads up that this MIGHT happen, and if it does, this is why. Hopefully it will be much less common now the bug is fixed, but given that this feature is rolling out to other file types in future, there is obviously the possibility that other bugs could surface in future as well. It looks like we're ok for now though, barring those non-updated browsers.