Allow Sites to Check if You Have Payment Methods Saved – How to Disable Chrome

How to Disable Google Chrome Allow Sites to Check if you have Payment Methods Saved

Google Chrome web browser has a number of advanced Privacy and security settings. Some of these are useful to make your web browsing experience better. Some of these settings seem like good ideas but are not a good choice when trying to protect your online privacy. For example, there is a fair amount of use tracking carried on by Google Chrome and all Google products such as maps and YouTube that many are unaware of. Turning location data off is one quick way to protect your online privacy.

What you may not know is that Chrome may have enabled this for you. Users can and should understand and set these privacy settings to help keep their personal data and payment information secure.

What Does “Allow Sites to Check if you have Payment Methods Saved” Mean?

It’s pretty much in the name. This is an advanced security setting in the Google Chrome web browser. When set to “on” it allows online shopping sites can to detect if you have credit card or PayPal credentials saved to your web browser. If you do have payment methods saved in Chrome and you allow e-commerce sites to check for the saved credit cards on your laptop, then the shopping websites can access that data to auto fill in payment information to pay for your purchase.

For online shoppers the main benefit to saving credit card information in Chrome is speeding up the checkout process. Saved payment methods allows e-commerce sites to access stored credit card credentials and customers can easily proceed through the purchase. This avoids the redundant and sometimes tedious process of entering card numbers, billing address, expiration dates, and security codes.

Saving payment information in your web browser or app also presents an abundance of cyber security issues. If you want to stop Chrome from giving permission to websites you visit to “check if you have payment methods saved” then you will have to make a security setting change in Chrome. It is easy enough.

To check if you do have any payment information saved (for an e-commerce site to check) in a web browser visit https://pay.google.com/payments

How to Disable “Allow Sites to Check if you have Payment Methods Saved” in Google Chrome

On any Android device you can check for payment information by going to your account on the Google Play store app. This ends up taking you to the Google Payments section on your account. iPhone users can check saved Payment information by going to their privacy settings in the Chrome app. If you have payment information saved on Google Chrome (or even if you don’t) you can increase your security settings by disabling this setting. This is a simple setting change if you know where to look for it.

Check if you have Payment Methods Saved – Five Steps

1. Open the Chrome Web Browser select the three dots on the upper right portion of the screen to drop down the menu
2. Select Settings
3. Scroll down to the button and choose Advanced
4. Scroll down to the Privacy and Security section
5. Scroll down to Allow sites to check if you have payment methods saved and slide the toggle to off chrome://settings/

If you want to be more secure, then go and delete your payment information from Google Chrome entirely. That way, you won’t have anything stored in case there is a data hack. If you have a subscription to a Google service such a s YouTube Red or are paying for Google Drive storage, then you won’t be able to delete the payment information used for those reoccurring payments. However, if you are the occasional online shipper then deleting credit card payment information and PayPal logins can help safeguard your money.

Michelle Dvorak

Michelle writes about cyber security, data privacy focusing on social media privacy as well as how to protect your IoT devices. She has worked in internet technology for over 20 years and owns METRONY, LLC. Michelle earned a B.S. in Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Michelle published a guide to Cyber Security for Business Travelers