TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT
Stop Chrome’s spellcheck saving your passwords
Google uses its Enhanced Spellcheck tool to improve spelling suggestions, which sounds innocent enough. So I was rather shocked to watch a YouTube video (www.snipca.com/43605) explaining how it sends everything you type to Google’s servers, including passwords and other sensitive information.
Enhanced Spellcheck isn’t activated by default, but I vaguely remembered turning it on a few months ago. I checked by typing chrome://settings/? search=Enhanced+Spell+Check into Chrome’s address bar (copy and paste this from www.snipca.com/43608), and sure enough the ‘Enhanced Spell Check’ option was selected. Admittedly, it says ‘text that you type in the browser is sent to Google’, but who would think that included passwords?
I instantly unselected in our screenshot), and left ‘Basic spell check’ enabled . This spots spelling errors when typing online, but doesn’t send any data to Google. If you don’t want spell-checking online, turn off the top-right slider .
