Why does Chrome say it’s «managed by your organization?»

Google Chrome says it’s «managed by your organization» if system policies control some Chrome browser settings. This can happen if you’re using a Chromebook, PC, or Mac that your organization controls, but other apps on your computer can also set policies.

What is Control in Chrome?

Management is a feature that allows administrators to control Chrome browser settings. Whether you’re using a Chromebook or just the Chrome browser at work, your employer may have hundreds of policies in place that control how Chrome works.

For example, an organization can use policies to set a home page that you cannot change, control whether you can print, or even blacklist certain web addresses. On Chromebooks, policies can control everything from screen lock delay to access to USB devices from web apps. Organizations can also enforce the installation of Chrome browser extensions through a policy.

Chrome isn’t the only app that can be controlled in this way. For example, administrators can manage Windows itself using Group Policy, and even the iPhone using mobile device management (MDM) software.

But I don’t have an organization!

In some cases, you may see this message even if Chrome is not managed by an organization. This is due to changes in Chrome 73. If your system software has corporate policies in place that affect how Chrome works, you’ll see this message even if it’s not entirely managed by your organization.

This message may be caused by legitimate software. As of April 3, 2019, quite a few people seem to be seeing the message due to software on their systems. Of course, it’s also possible that malware on your system can change your Chrome browser settings. There is no need to panic, but Google is showing you this message so you know something is going on and you can look at it.

How to Check if Chrome is Managed

You can check if Chrome is managed in several places. If you just open the Chrome menu, you’ll see the message «Chrome is managed by your organization» at the very bottom of the menu — under the Sign Out option — if it’s managed.

How to find out which settings are managed

To check which policies apply in Chrome browser, go to chrome://policy — just type or copy this address into the Chrome location field.

This will show you both the policies set by the software on your system and the policies set by your organization. You can click on the name of each policy to view its technical information on the Google website. If you see the message «No policies installed» here, it means that no policies are controlling Chrome on your system.

In the screenshot below, we can see that the «ExtensionInstallSources» policy is installed, but with no visible policy value — that should mean it doesn’t do anything, so it’s weird that it’s even here. We probably shouldn’t worry about this, but the message is rather annoying.

Hopefully Google will make this post more informative and provide an easy way to remove software policies in Chrome.

«Product experts» in the Chrome support community often recommend downloading «Chrome Policy Remover» to fix these policies, but we can’t recommend downloading and running strange files from random Google Drive accounts. Some Chrome users reported that this didn’t fix their issue.