The Cluttered Forms
Google Chrome features a robust “Autofill” system designed to save you time when shopping online or creating new accounts. If you type your home address or phone number into a website once, Chrome remembers it. The next time you click into any text box that even remotely looks like an address field (like a shipping form or a registration page), Chrome automatically pops up a large dropdown menu suggesting your full home address. While convenient on trusted sites, this can be annoying on messy web forms where the pop-up obscures the text you are actually trying to read, or a privacy concern if you share your computer with family members.
Clearing the Autofill Cache
To protect your privacy and stop Google Chrome from automatically suggesting your physical addresses and phone numbers in web forms, you must disable the address autofill feature in the browser settings.
Click the three vertical dots (the customize menu) in the extreme top-right corner of Chrome and select Settings. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, click on Autofill and passwords. In the main panel, click on Addresses and more. At the very top of this page, you will see a master toggle switch labelled Save and fill addresses (which includes information like phone numbers, email addresses, and shipping addresses). Click this toggle to turn it completely Off. Chrome will immediately stop prompting you with dropdown suggestions when you click into text boxes. If you want to permanently delete the data it already has stored, you will need to click the three dots next to your saved addresses on this same page and select “Remove.”