Chrome keeps Google's cookies alive despite 'delete on close' setting

Researcher Jeff Johnson (Lapcat Software) reports that Chrome 152.0.7977.83 preserves site data for www.google.com even when the browser is configured to wipe all on-device site data when every window closes. He reproduced the behavior on two Macs while signed out of Chrome, with sign-in disabled, and after switching the default search engine to DuckDuckGo to rule that out as a factor. After running a single Google search and closing the only open window, cookies, local storage, and session storage for google.com survive on disk — persisting across quit-and-relaunch and reappearing even after manual deletion.

Google’s own domain appears to be the sole exception to the deletion policy, echoing an earlier Chrome bug Johnson had documented. He declines to attribute it to deliberate favoritism, invoking Hanlon’s razor, but argues that a company of Google’s resources has no excuse for shipping a data-retention feature without adequate QA or unit tests. The report lands amid broader scrutiny of Google’s dominance, which Johnson ties to a call to break up its search monopoly and a complaint about opaque redirect URLs served to signed-out users.

Whether accident or design, the practical effect is a privacy control that silently fails for the one domain users might most want it to work against — undermining trust in Chrome’s site-data settings and handing regulators another data point in ongoing antitrust and privacy debates.