The antiphishing feature uses heuristics, as well as locally stored white & blacklists. It only sends information back to Symantec when it believes it has found a phishing site. When we do detect a phishing site, it will send the full URL of the detected site. There is an option in NIS 2009 to control whether the entire URL is sent (the Submit Full Site Information option that you refer to). Because we rely on the heuristics, the local blacklist is not as important (unlike Norton Safe Web, where we cannot use heuristics).
The Norton Safe Web feature does contact the Norton Safe Web servers for every Web site that you visit, and for the searches you perform. This is comparable to other products that perform this feature. It’s not possible to have a local whitelist/blocklist for this feature as the number of Web sites is very large, and changes every couple of minutes. However, it will use SSL and takes other measures to protect your privacy. The full privacy policy can be viewed in the installer for the product, but Symantec does not associate your computer/IP address with any browsing history.
As for performance, we do our best to make sure your browsing experience is not impacted. If you have the product and are experiencing any performance problems with a particular Web site, please let us know.
HTH, Ryan
Message Edited by ryan_mcgann on 04-21-2009 05:44 PM
Hi Ryan, just wanted to say thanks for your very informative reply.
That is all fair enough, so to just confirm, a person who was completely paranoid about their privacy and didn't want anything communicated to Symantec, would set it as so:
Antiphising - ON Submit Full Site Information - OFF Norton Safe Web - OFF Enhance Search Engine Results - OFF
Also I think it would be a good idea for Symantec to make this more clear in the help documentation of these features.