As of Mountain Lion, Google Chrome has asked for permission to view my contacts. Does this mean that it has likely had unrestricted access before?

I'm not sure why Chrome wants this access, but since prior to Mountain Lion there wasn't a prompt for this, it makes me think that it must have been looking at them this whole time. Right?

Solution 1:

Yes, right. Round about Tiger (10.4) Apple introduced a nice neat way for apps to integrate with your address book and calendar data stores etc. At the time it was a novel thing that allowed for any number of clever calendar widgets etc, and stuff that could happily replace the in-built tools (or enhance them) without you having to change anything at an account or data level.

These days, because of a number of high profile mobile apps getting in trouble for doing what the desktop OS have been doing for years, they are cranking up the security and privacy options.

Solution 2:

To turn this off and eliminate the error messages, you can do the following:

1. Click the Chrome menu on the browser toolbar. Select Settings.
2. Click Show advanced settings and find the "Passwords and forms" section.
3. Click "Manage Autofill Settings"
4. Deselect the "Include addresses from my Address Book card" checkbox.