Chrome's "clear site data" button, and the sites it quietly skips
A developer's post says Chrome once again leaves Google's own sites out of the settings you use to wipe site data. It reached the front page of Hacker News with 471 points.
You press the button that says your browser will clear what sites have stored about you. You assume it does what it says. A post published on lapcatsoftware.com argues that in Chrome, one company gets a pass from those settings: the company that makes Chrome. The headline is blunt — "Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings."
We have only the headline, the link and the discussion around it. On Hacker News it collected 471 points and 78 comments, which for that audience — mostly engineers who read the actual code before they get angry — is a lot of attention for a browser settings story. We have not seen the full article text, so we are not going to describe technical details we cannot show you.
A browser setting is a promise. It says: this is where you decide what stays and what goes. If the company that writes the browser is exempt from that promise, the setting stops being a control and becomes a description of what happens to everyone else. That is the part worth sitting with. The claim here is not that data is being stolen — it is that the switch does not cover the one party with the most to gain from it.
The word again in that headline is doing a lot of work.
We should be careful about how far we take this. The post is one developer's claim, published on his own site. It has not, in what we can see, been answered by Google. What made it travel was not proof of harm but recognition: a lot of people already suspected that the tidy privacy panel in their browser has an asterisk, and someone put a name on it.
Anyone who has ever opened Chrome's settings, hit the option to clear what sites keep on you, and assumed the job was done — which is most people with a phone or a laptop. And specifically the 20-40 crowd who run their whole life through one browser profile: job applications, rent payments, the crypto exchange, the dating app, the shopping tabs they'd rather not explain. If you clean up your browser before selling a laptop or handing it to a family member, you were relying on that button meaning what it says.
The source says nothing about a response, a fix, a deadline or an investigation, and we are not going to invent one. What is worth watching is simple and checkable: whether Google answers the claim publicly, and whether the behaviour described in the post changes in a later Chrome release. Until then, nobody has named a date.
The interesting thing is not that people were angry. It is that 471 people upvoted a claim about a settings panel and almost nobody sounded surprised. Somewhere along the way we started treating the privacy controls in our own software as decoration. That expectation is worth more to a company than any single setting.
Sources: lapcatsoftware.com, "Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings"; Hacker News (top), item 49581870 — 471 points, 78 comments.
Если браузер, которым пользуются миллиарды, сам исключает сайты своего владельца из настроек удаления данных, то кнопка «очистить» работает для всех, кроме того, кто следит за вами больше всех.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections