Chrome again exempts Google from user site data settings

September 5 2026

Six years ago I published a blog post Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings that received quite a bit of attention: Michael Tsai, Hacker News The Register, The Verge, and Gizmodo, among others. The blog post was about a Google Chrome bug that mysteriously exempted Google-owned sites from the setting to automatically delete all site data. Eventually, spurred by my report, Google did fix the bug.

You can probably guess why I’m writing about the bug again: I’ve noticed Chrome doing something similar now. I’ve reproduced this new issue on two different Macs with Chrome version 152.0.7977.83. For testing purposes, I changed the default search engine in Chrome from Google to DuckDuckGo, just to make sure that this setting was not the cause.

On-device site data settings ( chrome://settings/content/siteData ) shows that the Default behavior is to Delete data sites have saved to your device when you close all windows.

I’m not signed into Chrome and indeed disallow Chrome sign-in.

You can see on chrome://settings/content/all that no site data is saved.

Now I do a Google search.

Then I close the one and only window in Chrome.

Returning to chrome://settings/content/all , I find some google.com site data! This data persists even if I quit and relaunch Chrome.

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