It's not a mistake: the development deb for Chrome did exactly this - installed the repository key and a cron job to "protect" the apt-sources entry. Of course

It's not a mistake: the development deb for Chrome did exactly this - installed the repository key and a cron job to "protect" the apt-sources entry. Of course it's not really doing this secretly, in that you can read about it in the post-install script before you run dpkg, but I agree it doesn't feel right. Also, can't this be said of any package you install through the package manager? If you install it as root, then in principle you're giving root access to whatever is in the package. If you don't like it, there's always a way to run it with ordinary permissions (but the extra fiddling to get that working may be hairy) or under mandatory access control (definitely hairy).