Google is considering dropping Chrome's Password leak warnings

Google Chrome has a built-in security feature to check and warn users if saved passwords to the browser are involved in a data breach. This feature has been part of Safe browsing’s Standard Protection for a while now. However, Google is now considering deprecating the Password leak toggle altogether.

When Chrome detects a compromised password, it alerts you with a warning to change your password, like this:

“Change your password.
A data breach on a site or app exposed your password. Chrome recommends changing your password on [website name] now.”

Upon seeing this, users will typically head to the affected website and reset their password. This is a very useful feature, and Microsoft Edge has a similar security feature integrated as well.

Chrome to deprecate data breach Password leak warnings

As spotted by Windows Report, Google is now planning to deprecate this feature. The company is tracking a metric that shows how many users disable this toggle. If a high number of users are opting out, we might see Google removing the feature.

“Add a metric that checks if the password leak toggle is off. This metric is needed so we can get a better understanding of how many users opt out of the password leak toggle on the chrome://settings/Security page under standard protection since we are planning on deprecating it.” Google notes.

Since the feature is automatic and cannot be disabled in Enhanced Protection (which is not the default setting), user behavior data might be primarily coming from Standard Protection users. This could lead Google to believe the feature is less valuable than initially thought.

The decision or change hasn’t been finalized yet. If you have found this feature useful, you can enable it by visiting Settings > Password and Security, and under Standard Protection, enable “Warn you if a password was compromised in a data breach.”

Here are some possible reasons for users to opt-out of Password leak warnings for data breaches:

• The warnings might be overwhelming, especially for users who frequently encounter compromised password alerts.
• Some users might have their methods for checking compromised passwords, rendering the Chrome toggle redundant.
• There could be concerns about the accuracy of the warnings, leading users to disable them out of skepticism.

There are still several ways to check if your passwords stored in Chrome are compromised including even weak or reused. The Password Checkup built into Google Password Manager in Chrome offers this functionality, and Safety Check recently gained the ability to run in the background. So, regardless of the decision about the toggle, you’re still covered.