Chrome could soon give you greater control over bothersome compromised password warnings

In theory, the fact that Google Chrome can warn you if any of your saved passwords have been involved in breaches is a good thing. In theory. In practice, it can be a different story. There may be a very good reason for no wanting to change a particular saved password, rendering warnings nothing more than irritating.

You could, of course, disable password warnings completely, but this is clearly something of a security risk. But if an experimental setting Google is working on in Chrome makes its way to the release version of the browser, you could soon have finer-grained control over password warnings -- meaning that you could stop Chrome pestering you about passwords you won't want to change or can't change.

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At the moment, Chrome gives you what amounts to an all-or-nothing approach to password warnings. Head to Settings > Security and Privacy > Security, and you will probably find that Standard protection is enabled. Within this section is an option labelled Warn you if passwords are exposed in a data breach, and this can be toggled on and off.

In the latest preview builds of Chrome, Google has added an experimental flag that lets you disable the warning for individual passwords. As Techdows notes, this could be useful to prevent your router password being constantly flagged up.

You can enable this option by heading to chrome://flags/#mute-compromised-passwords, enabling the Mute & Unmute compromised passwords in bulk leak check option and then restarting Chrome.

Perform a password audit by heading to chrome://settings/passwords and clicking the Check Passwords option. To mute the warning for any password that are flagged up, click the three-dot menu next to the relevant Change Password button and select Dismiss warning.

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