I haven’t had a facebook account for a few years now – i did the deletion thing a while ago – but through a combination of neglect and indifference I’ve never purged either my Chrome or Firefox saved passwords for the account. Recently, I have had to visit facebook.com more often, and while I was looking through the browser dev tools and noticed that my autofilled email was being phoned home!
Why does my browser allow this to happen? I’d always assumed that the autofill data was sandboxed in some way. Well, in Chrome it is, but not in Firefox. What a bummer. I came across this Stackoverflow discussion that goes into more detail.
It’s not often that I find a situation where Firefox really disappoints me; this is one of them.
Even though Chrome’s approach isn’t perfect (see the stackoverflow thread for examples of workarounds), it’s at least a best effort to protect people using the autofill functionality. I know, the nerdiest and most security-consious users will not use autofill at all – good for you, but you’re in the minority, and I think browsers should have sensible pro-privacy defaults. In this case, Chrome shows that a browser can offer the user experience people might expect (autofilled forms) but also provide privacy as well.