Chrome once again makes an exception for Google in its site-data deletion settings

The author of the Lapcat Software blog has reported a repeat of a story he wrote about six years ago. Back then his note about Chrome exempting Google sites from the automatic data-deletion setting spread across The Register, The Verge, Gizmodo and Hacker News, and Google ultimately fixed the bug. Now, according to the author, the browser is behaving in a similar way once again.

He reproduced the problem on two different Mac computers running Chrome version 152.0.7977.83. To rule out any influence from the default search engine, he even switched it from Google to DuckDuckGo.

How the bug shows up

In the site-data settings (chrome://settings/content/siteData) the default behavior is selected — delete data saved on the device when all windows are closed. The author is not signed in to Chrome and, on top of that, has disabled signing in to the browser. The chrome://settings/content/all page confirms that no site data is stored.

Next he runs a single search query on Google and closes the only open window. Returning to the list of saved data, he once again finds google.com data — and it remains there even after a full restart of the browser. If you delete it manually and repeat the whole procedure, the situation reproduces all over again.

As far as he could establish, only www.google.com enjoys the exemption. Inside the Chrome profile folder, cookies are saved, along with Local Storage and Session Storage. Exactly when the bug appeared the author does not know: his main browser is Safari, and he uses Chrome mostly for testing.

Incompetence rather than conspiracy

The author deliberately avoids conspiracy theories and invokes “Hanlon's razor” — never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ordinary carelessness. That said, it is no excuse: a company with this much money and these many engineers, in his opinion, has no reason not to cover this feature with at least unit tests. Paraphrasing a well-known motto, he calls on Google to “move slower and break nothing.”

At the same time the author voices a more general irritation: he wishes the authorities would finally get around to breaking up Google's search monopoly, and along the way he complains that for signed-out users the links in the results now turn into opaque redirects of the form https://www.google.com/goto?url= instead of the usual website addresses.

Source: Hacker News