Your browser is managed by your organization

OS is Windows 10 Pro v1803. Brave version is 0.66.99, downloaded directly from the Brave site. Screenshot uploaded by Alex Firth shows the issue - the “Managed by your organization” entry at the bottom of the hamburger menu (same phrase appears at the top of the Settings page). This issue is not present on another of my rigs with Widows 10 Pro v1809 & same version of Brave, FWIW.

Hi,
I found a solution (German) for the problem in the HP forum.

Translated:

Hp forum solution

Hello,
thanks for your contribution to the HP Community.
Why don’t you put Chrome back completely?
If you saved “bookmarks”, save them first.
Then delete the following folder:
“C:\User\your username\AppData\Local\Google”
(AppData is hidden by default)
Start Chrome after that and the browser needs to be reinstalled.
Greetings Oliver

Short:
Reset the browser and delete the specified folder.

Since it is not Chrome, the path is not correct.
My theory is to delete this folder:
C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware
No guarantee, someone from Brave can add his mustard here.

@eljuno: Hi. Just to add more information regarding this issue. I also downloaded Brave for Win 10 directly from Brave.com, and I’m seeing the same situation - it is a bit concerning.

From what I can tell, the “organizational” management is coming from a browser policy that is set in the registry:

Can someone at Brave look into where this is coming from? It’s more than a little concerning.

Cheers.

@Daiwa Take a look in /etc/chromium/policies/managed/ you may have a system-wide policy in there that’s causing that message.

Thanks, Philip. Could you give the complete location path, please? Not finding it.

@Daiwa /etc/chromium/policies/managed/ was the full path on my system. I had had a system-wide policy in there from an old install of LastPass. I can remember the exact name of the file, but it was something like lastpass-policy.json. After deleting that file the message about Brave being managed my organization went away. Do you have any files in /etc/chromium/policies/managed/?

My malware scanner coincidentally offered this up this morning:

MWB%20Brave%20Installer%20Tag

I’ve only (knowingly) downloaded installers directly from Brave’s website & this was the most recent installer downloaded.

That url (/etc/chromium/policies/managed/) returns nothing, Crashmore.

Oh ok, I see the miscommunication now. /etc/chromium/policies/managed/ not a URL it’s a local file system path. Open your terminal and ls that path, it may require sudo depending on your system’s permissions. So…

ls /etc/chromium/policies/managed/ or sudo ls /etc/chromium/policies/managed/

No \etc\ local folder that I can find. Not familiar with using terminal on Win10.

My apologies. It was me that was confused. I thought I read above that you were using Zorin OS. Maybe what I mentioned would help @AlexFirth, if not sorry about the noise.

@Daiwa,
There’s nothing to worry about here – this is an inherited Chromium feature that you’re seeing in Brave. It’s very likely that you’re seeing this message due to a particular extension you have installed. Howtogeek has a short write-up on this “feature”:


:point_up: You can check brave://policy for more information on which extension may be causing this message to appear. Regardless, there’s no cause for alarm here.

Thanks, Mattches.

That’s indeed the case here:

I can’t begin to decipher what extension is the source (Platform?) and the article you were kind enough to link to offers no ‘fix’ per se, just says not to worry about it. Is it possible this could be set by malware? See my reply above about a Malwarebytes hit identifying the installer as infected.

@Daiwa,
Doubtful – a quick search yields several users reporting this behavior. As mentioned, it’s very likely an extension installed that was put there. First thing I would try:

  • Temporarily disabling all extensions and relaunching (may require pc restart? not sure) Brave. If the notification persists, we know it’s set by something other than an extension and we can further sniff out the real cause.

Additional/alternative tests:

  • Create a new browser profile using the “Manage people” menu: image.
    Manage People --> Add Person. This will create a new browser profile with no associated browsing data or extensions. Open the menu and check for the notification. This will again point us in the right direction of the cause.
  • Download a different Brave build and see if the notification appears there. Note that downloading another build will not overwrite or remove any Brave data on your machine/device currently (for example, I have Brave Nightly, Developer, Beta, and Release builds installed on my laptop right now all running in parallel).
    Further, if the notification does not appear, you can start adding extensions to this build to see if any one in particular causes it to appear – it’s sort of the “reverse” of the first suggestion mentioned.
  • Last, there is a way to simply turn the notification “off” when/if you find out that there’s nothing suspicious going on. To do so, type brave://flags into the address bar and search for the flag #show-managed-ui – disable it. Relaunch the browser and it should be gone.

Thanks for the additional suggestions, Mattches.

I have the same set of 4 extensions (Adobe Acrobat, LastPass, Scroll to Top Button and Tabs to the Front - no others) installed on another Win10 rig with same version of Brave that does not display this issue. Just FWIW.

@Daiwa,

Now that certainly is interesting. Can you try the second suggestion from above and see if you get the notification?

I created a new person and Adobe Acrobat was added automatically - interesting - and the browser is still ‘managed’.

I believe this is caused by installing the LastPass binary component according to this:

https://forums.lastpass.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=330965

I don’t think it’s necessarily harmful, I suspect it may have to do with the way the LastPass binary functions?

Confirming what @local said. It’s because of LastPass. If you don’t need LastPass on your computer, I removed the policies under

/etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed
/etc/chromium/policies/managed

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.