I think Chrome's implementation of security is flawed. If you stop thinking about this security as being a switch which is on or off and instead as a granular scale then you'll agree that Chrome's password handling is as low on that scale as possible. Now just so you know, I'm agreeing that Chrome can't fully lock down your passwords and I'm OK with the reasons why (convenience), but their doing something wrong here, they're not looking at the in-between.
The difference I see is if my spouse or boss wanted to look at my passwords they could, easily. I'm not OK with that. Now, tell me they have to install a trojan, a virus or some other software first to get access to my passwords and thats a level of safety which stops my boss. My boss won't have the technical know how to do it. My spouse could be looking just out of curiosity, the smallest roadblock would stop them. Chrome's implementation makes it easy for anyone to see passwords and that's just wrong!
The length of time anyone will have access to an unsupervised machine plays a role here. It shouldn't take 5 seconds of pointing and clicking that my gran could do to reveal all my passwords. It should take someone more effort!
The difference I see is if my spouse or boss wanted to look at my passwords they could, easily. I'm not OK with that. Now, tell me they have to install a trojan, a virus or some other software first to get access to my passwords and thats a level of safety which stops my boss. My boss won't have the technical know how to do it. My spouse could be looking just out of curiosity, the smallest roadblock would stop them. Chrome's implementation makes it easy for anyone to see passwords and that's just wrong!
The length of time anyone will have access to an unsupervised machine plays a role here. It shouldn't take 5 seconds of pointing and clicking that my gran could do to reveal all my passwords. It should take someone more effort!