The Background Data Exchange
Google Chrome’s Autofill feature is designed to save you time by automatically populating web forms with your saved names, addresses, and credit card information. To make this system smarter and more accurate across millions of different websites, Chrome utilizes a feature called “Autofill server communication.” When this is enabled, Chrome silently pings Google’s servers in the background while you are interacting with forms. It asks Google for crowd-sourced metadata about the specific form fields on the website you are visiting, and it also sends anonymous telemetry back to Google regarding how successful the autofill attempt was.
While Google states this data is anonymized and used strictly to improve the form-recognition algorithm, it represents a constant, underlying stream of network traffic and telemetry between your browser and Google’s servers every time you shop or register for a site. If you are highly privacy-conscious, or if you are working on a restricted corporate network where unnecessary outbound background pings are flagged by the firewall, you should disable this server communication. Your local autofill will still work; it just won’t consult Google for help.
How to Turn Off Autofill Telemetry
You can sever this specific background communication link via the experimental flags menu.
- Open Google Chrome.
- Click inside the main address bar at the top of the browser.
- Type
chrome://flagsand press Enter. - A page titled “Experiments” will load.
- In the search bar at the top, type Autofill server communication.
- The specific flag will appear highlighted in yellow. Next to it is a dropdown menu.
- Change the dropdown menu setting from “Default” or “Enabled” to Disabled.
- Click the blue Relaunch button at the bottom of the screen.
Upon restarting, Chrome will rely entirely on its local heuristics to figure out how to fill out forms, completely stopping the background telemetry pings to Google’s autofill servers.