a picture of 3 plastic bears, blue, orange, and yellow
kernpanik

mare liberum

Google Chrome's hidden history

20 May 2015

This is kind of disturbing. Today, I played around with the settings in Google Chrome. At some point I ended up in a menu called Zoom levels (Settings > Content Settings > Zoom Levels). It contained quite a long list of websites I visited during the past few weeks, plus some information about the zoom level I used on each page to read it:

Screenshot of the Zoom Levels menu

The weird thing is that I delete my browser history on a daily basis, but some of the websites in this list are over a month old. To be quite clear: When I delete my history, cookies and cached data, I do not want a list of visited websites to remain on my hard drive. Obviously, this is not what the developers had in mind when they implemented this "feature".