Q. Every time I start up Chrome, it pesters me for access to my Mac’s password Keychain. Should I let it? How do I stop it from asking?
“Google means well with this poorly presented request. It is its way of asking whether it can keep your passwords in sync with other copies of its browser,” Rob Pegoraro writes for USA Today. “But you should decline the offer unless you use Chrome as your primary browser on a Mac and you can secure your computer against curious passers-by, change a hidden and experimental setting, or do both.”
“This situation can arise if you enable Chrome’s optional sign-in feature, which syncs your browser use — not just bookmarks, but open pages, settings and passwords — across multiple devices,” Pegoraro writes. “If you’d already saved Web passwords in Apple’s Safari browser, Chrome will ask whether it, too, can have access to the OS X Keychain’s database of those logins. Unfortunately, the standard Keychain-access dialog only has ‘Allow,’ ‘Always Allow’ and ‘Deny’ buttons — not ‘Get out of my face and don’t ever ask again.'”
“After I tweeted a little rant over that, Ars Technica‘s Jon Brodkin pointed out a fix,” Pegoraro writes. “In Chrome’s settings, click the ‘Advanced Sync Settings…’ button and uncheck ‘Passwords.’ Chrome hasn’t bothered me with a Keychain nag since. But even having Chrome confine saved passwords to your own computer can carry a security risk…”
Read more in the full article here.