Most family Chrome problems are really door problems: visitors using your profile, children wandering into your history, your passwords one click from everyone. Chrome already ships the right doors — Guest mode, child profiles and Family Link. Here is which door fits which person.
Before locking anything, sort out who should be in which window. A visitor needs Guest mode, which forgets everything. A child needs their own profile, and possibly real supervision. You need your profile to not be the family default. This page arranges all three, honestly.
Guest mode is a temporary Chrome window. It shows no bookmarks, no history, no saved passwords from any profile — and when the guest window closes, the browsing done inside it is deleted, not just hidden.
This is the correct answer for the neighbour, the guest at home and the customer at a shop counter. One honest note: Guest mode does not hide activity from the network owner or make anyone anonymous online — it only keeps the local machine clean.
For a child who uses the family PC every week, Guest mode gets tiring — nothing is ever saved. Give them their own Chrome profile instead: their bookmarks, their history, their school logins, kept separate from yours.
Be clear about what this is: organisation, not a lock. On one shared Windows account, a curious child can still click over into your profile — which is exactly why the family setup works best as a pair: their own profile for daily use, and your profile guarded by the Browser Lock extension or, better, your own Windows account.
When a child has their own Google account, Chrome offers actual supervision through Google Family Link: a parent manages the child's signed-in Chrome experience — approving or blocking sites, viewing activity and setting limits — from the parent's phone.
That is a different thing from anything on this page: it manages the child's own account, on whichever device they sign in. It does not lock your profile, and it is not a filter you install on a profile — it is account-level supervision, and for children with their own accounts it is the officially supported route.
Four small decisions, made once, and the daily arguments about who saw whose history simply stop happening.
The full profile lock setup on screen — extension install, password set and the live test.
▶️ Watch Full VideoLocally, yes — when the guest window closes, its history, cookies and downloads list are removed from Chrome. It does not erase traces outside Chrome, such as files saved to the disk or records on the home router or internet provider.
Yes, if you share one Windows account and your profile has no lock — profiles are one click apart. Add the Browser Lock extension to your profile for casual protection, or use separate Windows accounts for the real wall.
No. A profile is just a separate container inside Chrome on that PC. Family Link is Google's supervision system for a child's own Google account, managed by a parent — it controls what that account's Chrome can do across devices.