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The process com.apple.Safari.SafeBrowsing.Service has written >24GB in the last few days despite I rarely use Chrome and Safari.

screenshot of activity monitor showing evidence for 24.35G written

I'd like to find out if the data frequently changes or is just quite huge. For that I'd need to know where safe browsing data is stored to.

So I used lsof -p 1720 to see all files currently opened by com.apple.Safari.SafeBrowsing.Service. Among the usually open files, there is /private/var/folders/[a]/[b]/C/com.apple.Safari.SafeBrowsing/... containing about 27M, a 910th of 24GB.

The process has been running for 22d and 10h (=538h).

% ps -ax -o etime,command -c | grep 'com.apple.Safari.SafeBrowsing.Service'
22-10:05:52 com.apple.Safari.SafeBrowsing.Service

910 refreshes in 538h makes a refresh about every 35 minutes; 24G in 22,5d makes about 1G per day.

Is there a way to reduce safe browsing data written by this service on Mac Ventura? Over the designated lifespan of that Mac, that'd be 4440G = 4,3T. That's not increadibly insane but too much for something I barely require (as you can see from the Bytes Read).

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  • Have you tried turning off "Warn visiting a fraudulent website" in Safari Settings > Security?
    – Ezekiel
    Jan 6 at 18:34
  • @Ezekiel the option was enabled. I've turned it off in Safari now and will report if the Bytes Written counter increases again. It's at 25.57G now and thecom.apple.Safari.SafeBrowsing.Service is still running. I read that Chrome may also use its data. Jan 7 at 23:30
  • As of today, it's 44,91G written by SafeBrowsing.Service. I'll reboot the Mac soon and see if the service starts up without opening Safari and if so, how much data it will write. Jan 25 at 20:55

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