Easily Fix Annoying Chrome Managed by your Organization – But Should You?

The Issue

If you are anything like me when you noticed the phrase “Managed by your Organization” in Chrome while on your personal PC you got a little worried. What organization? When did that happen? Am I somehow signed into my work/school account? Is this a virus?

Your next step was likely like mine. Google.

After that, you might have gone through a whole process of uninstalling extensions, running a virus scan, resetting Chrome, uninstalling Chrome. Only to find out, none of those worked either. You still had “Managed by your Organization” in your main Chrome menu!

It turns out the answer to why this mysterious menu item appeared and how to remove it may be Avast.

In Avast, and potentially other virus scanners, there is an option to “Enable QUIC/HTTP3 scanning”. This is the setting that is causing Chrome to assume that your organization is managing the browser.

What is QUIC?

Well, according to Wikipedia, QUIC “is a general-purpose transport layer network protocol initially designed by Jim Roskind at Google”¹. It “improves performance of connection-oriented web applications that are currently using TCP”². If you would like to read more about exactly what QUIC is please have a look at the Wikipedia article as it is very extensive.

Why is Avast Scanning QUIC?

Based on a forum posting³ it seems that because of the shields and scanning that Avast and potentially other virus programs do when QUIC is enabled in Chrome and other browsers, it cannot scan that incoming traffic. This could leave your computer open for attacks.

Disable QUIC Scanning

You can disable this feature in Avast quite simply by:

1. Opening the Avast user interface
2. Opening the settings by clicking on Menu, then Settings
3. Navigating to the Protection section of the settings by clicking on the button
4. Selecting Core Shields and scrolling down to Configure shield settings
5. Next click on Web Shield within that section mentioned above
6. You will notice Enable QUIC/HTTP3 scanning is checked.
7. Uncheck that box to disable the scanning and to remove the “Managed by your Organization” from Chrome

Should you Disable QUIC Scanning?

My suggestion would be to just leave the items checked and live with the “Managed by your Organization” item in the Chrome menu. I would try out disabling it temporarily, closing and reopening Chrome just to check if that did indeed remove that option from the menu. If it did not, you might still have some other issues going on. After, you have checked to see that it removed, just re-enable that option in Avast.

Disabling this option in Avast does leave you more vulnerable to attacks. I am not suggestion at all that you disable this feature in Avast. But as stated it is a good idea to at least temporarily disable to check if that is where the issue is coming from with your installation of Chrome.

References

1, 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC
3 https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=224995.0