The goal of all auto-updating is more secure browsing and a lessened chance of malware hijacking the application and planting itself on a PC. Removing the responsibility for updates, particularly security updates, from the user has been a decades-long theme in software for a good reason — it results in a higher percentage of up-to-date devices. (The 2017 WannaCry attacks starkly illustrated the differences between quickly patched and unpatched Windows systems.)
Attempting to disrupt automatic updates can be futile because Chrome’s updating mechanism cannot be permanently switched off without the business infrastructure of Active Directory. “To prevent abuse of this policy, if a device is not joined to an Active Directory domain, and if this policy has been set to 0 or to a value greater than 77 hours, this setting will not be honored and replaced by 77 hours after August 2014,” a Chrome support document reads, referring to a group policy that allows enterprise IT staffers to disable the feature.
In plainer English, that means attempts to turn off auto updates, including by setting a Windows Registry key — a cornerstone of many of the techniques available on the web — will fail as the time between update checks reverts to 77 hours, or about 3.2 days.
