4 ms·
Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings
- fedpost 27d agoIt's okay, they're not a monopoly according to this administration. Nothing to see here, carry on!
- Mountain_Skies 27d agoGoogle and the rest of the billionaire class thank you for ensuring everyone is too divided by red/blue tribalism to ever have enough unity to mount a fight against them. Well done!
- asdf88990 27d agoExactly. It is like Google has only emerged during this administration with their shenanigans.
- 8note 27d agoiirc lina khan was appointed during the first trump admin and got most of her work done suing to split google during the biden admin? you are a bit out of the loop if you think this is a partisan issue, or specifically one thats only there when trump is in charge
- c0balt 27d agoShe got nominated by Biden in Biden's last term in March of 2021 and left in 2025 two weeks after Trump assumed office. She did not get appointed under Trump nor did substantial work done under his administration. Edit: I do not necessarily disagree with your comment on the partisan aspects of this issue. This is only meant to respond to the first paragraph.
- thephyber 27d agoUsing Lina Khan as an example (your only example?) undermines your point because she started upset Biden and was quickly fired after Trump 2 started.
- manlymuppet 27d agoAllow me to be anal for a moment, but what is the point of doing “if I remember correctly” for something like this? You can very easily look up exactly when Lina Khan was appointed and get answer very quickly. Is it not worth the effort checking these things before commenting? Ok rant over. Sorry to be an asshole. This is not your fault as much a standard which should be changed.
- jtmarl1n 26d agoI’m 100% with you on the spirit of this comment. I don’t understand it either. I fear the standard you mentioned has been set at far too low of a level.
- usr1106 27d agoIt seems to be very popular on this site to condemn surveillance capitalism and billionaires. But who built and still maintains the basis for their power, misusing it and the billions. So-called smart engineers like many of HN readers. If they rated morale higher than their personal 100Ks we would not need to wait for a government to stop the misery (in vain). Yes, I have worked for 400,000 employees corp, then for a 70,000. For the last 15 years I have staid under 100. The pay is less, but it's easier to look into the mirror each morning.
- Geezus_42 26d agoWhat rock have you been living under?
- patates 26d agoSo we cannot say anything bad about the current administration without being divisive? What does criticising them tell you about tribalism?
- shevy-java 26d agoThe point is that no matter which party rules, they are bribed by big business to represent the interest of big business. Criticism without change does not really work well.
- pavon 27d agoThis administration has done nothing to end or undermine the antitrust cases against Google. In both cases the judges found Google in violation of antitrust law, but both handed down fairly mild remedies, despite the administration (prosecutor) pushing for much stronger changes. The judges were appointed by Clinton (Leonie Brinkema) and Obama (Amit Mehta).
- eesmith 26d agoPerhaps not US cases, but those aren't the only antitrust cases against Google. What about Trump's threats after Google was hit with a 2.95 billion Euro fine from the European Commission's antitrust investigation? From last year: "EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič on Monday made an 11th-hour intervention to stop the European Commission from issuing a penalty against American tech giant Google for its search advertising practices, amid continued trade threats from U.S. President Donald Trump." https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-google-antitrust-decision-halted-amid-us-trade-talks-trump-sefcovic-ribera/ https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-google-antitrust-decision... Or from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/google-meta-big-tech-6-billion-euros-eu-fine.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/10/google-meta-big-tech-6-billi... "In February, Trump signed a memorandum stating the U.S. would consider tariffs to “combat digital service taxes (DSTs), fines, practices, and policies that foreign governments levy on American companies.”" That memorandum is at https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-issues-directive-to-prevent-the-unfair-exploitation-of-american-innovation/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/fact-sheet-pr...
- pessimizer 26d ago[flagged]
- eesmith 26d agoMy point is that your claim 'This administration has done nothing to end or undermine the antitrust cases against Google.' is incorrect if you also include European antitrust cases. Yes, the last 50 years of post-Borkianism has resulted in an entire judicial system having a very narrow and essentially useless definition of anti-trust, far different from its original goals. That's part of the broader neo-liberal movement which started around the time of Carter, gained strength with Reagan, continued with Clinton's "triangulation" and NAFTA, and is still with us. Yes, the League of Women Voters warned us about what you term the "two private clubs" back in 1988 when they decided to stop hosting the United States presidential debates saying that following the demands of the two parties would "perpetrate a fraud on the American voter". Yet you seem to think I'm somehow shocked that same aged corporate Democrats who supported Obama, and who now fight tooth and nail against the democratic socialist arm of their party, are somehow in actually in favor of effective antitrust enforcement? Your rant makes it seem like you're just easily triggered by the least bit of correction. > I want to see a third Trump term. Ahh, you're one of those anti-Constitution people. I remember as a kid people calling out "four more years" in support of a 3rd Reagan term, as their hero worship made them forget the lesson of FDR and the Twenty-second Amendment. Just like those people who forget the lesson of Guiteau about a consequence of whims and bribes as a way to run a government.
- pampas 27d agoNo politicians are going to fight a media company. They're in the PR and advertising supply chain.
- shevy-java 26d agoThe administration is serving private business only. They don't care about the people. It is not a democracy nor a republic state. It is an oligarchy. Thankfully more and more people realise how corrupt the orange mafia is. Recent polls show that - people learn slowly, but they learn.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 26d agoThis admin said they are: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-significant-remedies-against-google https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi... > Google used anticompetitive tactics to maintain and extend its monopolies in search and search advertising.
- htx80nerd 26d ago[dead]
- stogot 25d agoBlame the judges . Two judges determined Google was a monopoly but the judges declined to take drastic recourse. It’s fun to bang on the anti administration drum but this is a court thing. Edit: they did do the thing you said they didn’t https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-significant-remedies-against-google https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-signi...
- thinker34 27d ago>> I’m personally inclined to cite Hanlon’s razor here rather than engage in conspiracy theories. That is a likely case. Chrome is their closed source software unlike the Chromium browser.
- alance 26d agoDoes the same behaviour manifest in Chromium?
- saint_yossarian 26d agoI can reproduce it with Chromium 152.0.7977.75 on Debian sid.
- lapcat 26d agoInteresting, thanks for testing!
- LastTrain 27d agoHanlon’s Razor applies to human behavior, not corporations.
- tehlike 27d agoEngineers are humans.
- edoceo 27d agoCorporations are not, they're made of humans but they behave worse than an individual.
- isncjwjxjwnd 27d agoAnd who do you think makes these behavioural decisions? There is no “corporation”, there are, however, those currently on that company’s payroll. It’s their fault. The people. The humans. The ones working there. The ones knowingly employing their knowledge in service of the company. It’s always the humans.
- mgiampapa 27d agoI feel like the obvious thing to check here is that all chrome processes have terminated between tests. If it's still running some zombie process of course the data would persist.
- frankacter 27d agoAt least on windows, closing chrome doesn't close the system tray process which keeps Chrome and Gemini prestaged and cached. Wonder if OP is experiencing a version of that on his Mac?
- Tempest1981 27d agoMicrosoft Edge does this too, iirc, for "Startup Boost".
- lapcat 27d ago> Wonder if OP is experiencing a version of that on his Mac? No.
- stkdump 27d agoIt would still be a (albeit convenient for google) bug, as the setting indicates closing all windows as the trigger for deletion.
- troupo 26d agoIt's convenient that "zombie processes" only retain data for Google-owned sites https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49583517
- freeAgent 26d agoWhy would that cause only Google’s info to be preserved across sessions, though? Somewhere, Google are privileging their own data and preventing it from being deleted when other data are deleted and the browser is configured so everything should be gone.
- flyingshelf 27d agoWhen you log into Google, you also log into Chrome. This means that you'll have a lot of exceptions for Google websites or else a "clear history" would log you out of Chrome. Not justifying it (I don't use chrome) but that's likely what's happening here.
- demibabs 27d agoIn the article he explains he’s not signed into Chrome nor Google during the experiment.
- ande-mnoc 27d agoThis is what the “Allow Chrome sign-in” setting is for and is turned off by the post author.
- flyingshelf 26d agoWhat I mean is that the browser has exceptions for Google and that most likely not all code paths follow the user settings. Still a bug though.
- cute_boi 27d ago> all Google Search results are now opaque https://www.google.com/goto?url= https://www.google.com/goto?url= garbage rather than the site URLs! Can google justify why are they doing this? I wish google will die sooner if they start behaving like this.
- avaer 27d ago1) So the backend can track you across fingerprinted links 2) So you can't know what's searched without getting tracked You're the product, not the customer.
- SV_BubbleTime 27d agoRemember AMP? Baby steps and they’ll try again.
- iririririr 26d agothey don't have to! they remembered they control all browsers. much easier for the same goals they had with amp
- nubinetwork 26d agoGoogle still uses amp on websites with a lot of ads... go figure that the king of ads dislikes some ads.
- 1e1a 27d agoInteresting observation: As soon as you right click on a link, it switches from that to https://www.google.com/url https://www.google.com/url?...
- iririririr 26d agothey do that because they added this dark pattern on gmail almost two decades ago and absolutely nobody ever complained. why wouldn't they expand it?
- troupo 26d ago> Can google justify why are they doing this? Look at Google's earnings reports and see what constitutes 80-90% of their revenues and profits
- righthand 27d agoGoogle/Alphabet is a bunch of useful good intentioned services wrapped around an nonuseful evil analytics core/monopoly. The people who work with good intentions that “just want to build cool things”, protect the monopoly and the people with bad intentions, who work to empower Google’s monopoly.
- tjpnz 27d agoGoogle needs to be broken up.
- Zarathustra30 27d agoWhile I absolutely believe this, the author should include a control. Go to a different website that sets data, and show that it is deleted when Google data is not.
- lapcat 27d agoI did: "As far as I can tell, www.google.com is the only site exempted by Chrome." My screenshots do not show this, but my screenshots were not intended as proof, merely as explanation. Chrome is available to everyone and used by millions of people, so anyone who wants proof can reproduce the issue themselves, and I hope that they do.
- netsharc 26d agoThe fact that the first screenshot is a totally empty browser window (just to show the address bar) made me lose faith about reading the rest of your writing...
- jrflowers 26d agoLooks like a lot of the other folks here read the post
- lapcat 26d agoHuh? I can't make sense of this criticism. What "faith" do you need? Every screenshot in the blog post is the same size, which made it easier to do the <img> tags. (I write my blog in raw HTML.) Also, the first screenshot shows that my start page in Chrome is not Google Search, which is in fact quite relevant to the content of the blog post. For the same reason, I showed a screenshot of Chrome sign-in disabled. Nonetheless, another commenter (who doesn't even use Chrome!) claimed that Chrome sign-in was the cause: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49582989 To be honest, these comments depress me.
- DangitBobby 26d ago
- Abdullah_Sattar 27d ago[flagged]
- bergheim 27d agoI hate $THING Firefox does, and I'll complain about it, and I will use $CHROMIUM browser and not complain about that for some reason!
- nosioptar 26d agoI complain about Firefox out of hope that the people at Mozilla will pull their heads out of their asses. I dont bother complaining about chrome because I generally do not use it and I certainly don't expect anyone at google to care at all about their users, decency, etc.
- zamadatix 25d agoTry to put down the "our team vs your team" fight long enough to join the author, a Safari user, in bashing Chrome for another of its problems instead of jumping to taunt those who don't use Firefox.
- est 27d agoI used to search on google.ca exclusively with disabled js and cookie Until the day it no longer works. Sad.
- liquid_thyme 27d agoChrome may be an excellent browser, but the venn diagram overlap with malware keeps getting larger.
- draw_down 26d ago[dead]
- shevy-java 26d agoIs it excellent? It feels more to me that the competition does not really exist - or just sucks. And then people largely gave up, letting the adMoney take over everything. I abandoned firefox when a mozilla dev claimed Linux users can only listen to audio via systemd+pulseaudio (unless you recompile firefox but who in his sane mind wants to use mozconfig in 2026 - https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox.html https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...). On adChromium, audio on youtube videos (also owned by Google) works fine, without me having to change anything. And older firefox versions also worked fine. At that moment in time I realised that firefox was no longer about the people. I stopped using it and I seem to not have been the only one who got frustrated with mozilla.
- nextaccountic 26d agoFirefox is amazing I don't use pulseaudio and audio works fine. (I use pipeware)
- TheGoddessInari 26d agoPipewire just works without needing the awfulness of pulseaudio, but there's also "apulse" to shim directly to alsa if you want more like the older behavior. But Pipewire is far more compatible and modern.
- NewsaHackO 26d agoWhat sane person use non systemd Linux? I kid, of course and thank you for your service in keeping the linux ecosystem honest in terms of reducing systemd’s hegemony and everything but this cannot be a problem you are not used to running into.
- suqingfu 27d ago[flagged]
- procaryote 26d agoJust another reason to stop using chrome and it's related browsers. If you don't want to hand the biggest ad company a monopoly over web-browsing, start using a gecko based browser like librewolf, zen, mullvad or firefox.
- rf15 26d agoAlso support Ladybird. It's not generally usable just yet, but the strides its taking forward are immense.
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- shevy-java 26d agoFolks, We must do something about Google. They ruin the www.
- rbtms 26d agoSomeone correct me if I'm wrong, but I suppose this allows google to better persist browser identifiers in order to facilitate advertising? I'm not surprised they do this since advertising represents almost 3/4 of Google 's revenue. If anything, why should anyone expect something else? Company in the ads business modifies monopolistic browser to make money with ads and more news at 11. If it's not this, it's going to be another thing in the future.
- makeitdouble 26d agoBeing surprised or not, and being pissed about it or not are orthogonal. I'm also not surprised and do fault Google for it. We shouldn't give them a pass just because they're regular offenders, it should be the opposite IMHO.
- joquarky 26d agoWhat I am surprised about is that even with all of this effort that is put into tracking us, the majority of ads that I see don't even fit my demographic.
- makeitdouble 26d agoI think it's due to the lack of proper ads at a price point worth it. For instance your local fishing shop won't win the ad auction for your eyeballs against Binance or Tinder, even if you have absolutely no interest in the latter.
- rbtms 25d agoThat's a very good point. I'm sad that's exactly what people are doing, giving it a pass, since its market share doesn't seem to decrease.
- dev1ycan 26d agoAbsolute piece of garbage browser, just use firefox and or ladybird once it comes out
- jmyeet 26d agoGoogle is playing a dangerous game here and I think it's going to bite them in the butt. First, some history. One thing that made Microsoft successful was a strategy called embrace, extend and extinguish ("EEE"). This is what they tried to do to Java back when it was believed that Java was a threat to Microsoft's platform monopoly since the Java mantra was "write once, run anywhere". Microsoft added all these proprietary extensions after licensing Java. Well, Microsoft basically did the same thing to knock Netscape off its throne. It was the whole basis for the antitrust suit. This was aimed at Java too because Java introduced applets. MS added ActiveX controls. MS did succeed at killing Netscape but the antitrust suit (and probably the victory over Java and Netscape) led us to more than a decade of hell with IE6 compatibility as MS basically abandoned their browser. Google did something in the mid-2000s that nobody thought was possible: they created a browser and got mass adoption without having a platform. People willingly downloaded it. And when it was first released, it was magical. They pioneered one process per tab. At the time, Netscape had faded into Fireforx and it was pretty bad. Your entire browser could hang since it was one thread per tab and it absolutely did hang. At this time and really through the mid-2010s, Google was a good actor with Chrome (IMHO). Chrome was secure, stable and a pretty open platform. Unfortunately for Google, this became a problem as use of ad blockers became more widespread. Where Chrome once became a posterchild for standards support, other parts of Google weren't so... open. Youtube at this time started playing games when people were using non-Chrome browsers. Anyone who uses Chrome knows that the anti-ad blocking really stepped up. Changes to what extensions are allowed to do killed uBlock Origin. Google has risked regulatory wrath by special-casing their own user-tracking and ad cookies while blocking other third-party cookies. They also tried to phase out third-party cookies in favor of what sounded like a first-party only tracking (FLoC? I think it was called?). Another issue is that Google always wanted people to be logged in with search and for the longest time they weren't. Well, people basically opted in to this by using Chrome and using a Google account. I used to really like the Google account syncing with Chrome. A lot of that for me has been replaced by using a password manager. My point is I once was a huge Chrome fan and now I really want there to be an alternative. I trust Apple with Safari/iOS more than Google with Chrome/Android at this point. YMMV. I find myself using Firefox a lot (again). Anyway, this whole messing with user tracking and ads I think could be Chrome's downfall and might invite regulatory scrutiny.
- sansah 26d agoGoogle just did Google thing on a Google owned browser. No surprises here of course
- kingkandu 26d agoungoogled-chromium is where it's at
- Havoc 26d agoDon't trust Google
- atoa 26d agoCoincidently, I ran into this same situation last week. Spent way too much time trying to delete some accidental search query from pasting something in the url bar. Tried a bunch of things without luck. Had to manually delete records in a couple of SQLite files under the Chrome profile to make it go away.
- MetroWind 26d agoI just don't understand why people keep using Chrome.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 26d agoNo mention of chrome://settings/clearBrowserData Use this before using chrome://settings/siteData Not sure if this is still the case with current versions One of the top comments in this thread suggests Chrome is a keylogger https://thomascountz.com/2025/07/17/chromes-ssl-bypass-cheatcode https://thomascountz.com/2025/07/17/chromes-ssl-bypass-cheat... This blog calls this a "cheat code". One could also call it a keylogger as that's what it feels like when using it; there's no display of the characters being typed Using a local TLS forward proxy is a more effective way to control cookies than using Chrome settings. Of course, Google tries to make this more difficult with the requirement for the "cheat code" but typing into the keyloagger is not always necessary, not every site requires the "cheat code"
- account42 25d ago> I’m personally inclined to cite Hanlon’s razor here rather than engage in conspiracy theories. Why? Hanlon's razor has never been a good heuristic when dealing with faceless corporation. An on top of that, Goodhart's law applies - when incompetence becomes an accepted excuse then bad actors will use that to hide their maliciousness.
- lapcat 25d ago> when incompetence becomes an accepted excuse I couldn't have been any more explicit that it's not an accepted excuse: "Google has no excuse for incompetence".
- tunetheweb 22d agoWe've investigated and found the bug: https://crbug.com/559302209 https://crbug.com/559302209 It's not just Google.com but any site using Compression Dictionary Transport (which google.com was an early adopter of - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/search-compression-dictionaries https://developer.chrome.com/blog/search-compression-diction...). The shared dictionaries are an additional storage added with this feature but are not getting correctly cleared on close. A fix is being worked on to resolve that. Follow above bug if interested when that lands...