Unchecking Enable phishing and malware protection in Chrome's browser settings page does not prevent Chrome from communicating with safebrowsing.clients.google.com and safebrowsing-cache.google.com (according to packets captured using Wireshark).
How can I disable this feature?
You could edit your hosts file, which will block the traffic. Maybe there is a less brute force way, but I'm sure this will work.
Add the following to your hosts file in Linux and Windows:
127.0.0.1 safebrowsing.clients.google.com
127.0.0.1 safebrowsing-cache.google.com
Add the following to your hosts file in OSX:
0.0.0.0 safebrowsing.clients.google.com
0.0.0.0 safebrowsing-cache.google.com
Your hosts file is found at the following location:
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts/etc/hosts/private/etc/hostsMore information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_%28file%29
Mac OSX information added from JTM's answer to ensure everyone seeing this gets the correct information.
Adding 127.0.0.1 for safebrowsing-clients.google.com or safebrowsing-cache.google.com does not help. I did just that and according my suricata logs it is still pointing to the Google's real addresses, so browser does not use hosts file for that. I also tcpdumped the whole C-class where it previously pointed and still there is traffic to these addresses while I request totally different web sites.
However string match in iptables does the trick:
iptables -I FORWARD -m string --to 41 --algo bm --string 'safebrowsing-clients' -j GOOGLE
iptables -I FORWARD -m string --to 41 --algo bm --string 'safebrowsing-cache' -j GOOGLE
iptables -I GOOGLE -m string --to 80 --algo bm --string 'google' -j DROP
So a bit awkward and works only in Linux, but it works.
In response to Paul's post, the OS X file is /private/etc/hosts. Don't use 127.0.0.1 on OS X. Use 0.0.0.0. You want it to return no route, not a route to the localhost.
0.0.0.0 safebrowsing.clients.google.com
0.0.0.0 safebrowsing-cache.google.com
