SurfSafe is a browser extension intended to help viewers spot fake news, in the form of altered or misleadingly used images.

RoBhat Labs, a company founded by two undergraduates at University of California, Berkeley,[2] who had previously developed software that identified bot accounts on Twitter.

[5] Neal Krawetz, an expert in network security and image analysis, has gone further, not only saying that SurfSafe does not come anywhere near doing what it claims, but recommending against installing it due to privacy concerns.

[6] In 2017, Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte, both undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, began developing online tools to help combat the spread of misinformation on the Internet.

It uses machine learning and natural language processing to assess the probability that a Twitter account is a bot spreading political propaganda.

Bhat and Phadte believed that their model, which attempted to identify and differentiate between human and bot posting patterns, had achieved a 93.5% accuracy rate.

"It's a bit of a leap to expect someone whose main window to the internet is Facebook to take the additional step of installing a fact-checking plug-in."

However, he allowed, if SurfSafe started to develop a community that elevated less reliable news outlets to a position of high trust, RoBhat would update its models.

However, he considered that a small problem, since the images the extension aims to spot are those that spread virally, meaning many people will be looking at them in a short period of time.

It tested on two widely circulated altered images: one a Seattle Seahawks player apparently burning an American flag as his teammates cheered in the team's locker room (the flag had been added to the original image, which had merely showed him dancing), and another of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor and gun control activist Emma González tearing up a copy of the U.S. Constitution (it had actually been some shooting targets).

[5] On his blog, Hacker Factor, Neal Krawetz, an expert in network security and image analysis who operates the FotoForensics.com website,[12] took a very negative view of SurfSafe.

During his tests, the developer panel on Chrome revealed that the extension was querying his browser for the URL and all images on every page he visited to store in RoBhat's own servers.