According to François Beaufort, who is Google’s Chromium Evangelist, the tech giant is toying with the idea of adding features to Chrome OS that would make it possible for owners of such devices to remotely lock, wipe, and find them.
However, the appearance of these features in future versions of Chrome OS is not exactly guaranteed.
Beaufort wrote on a Google+ post that the Chromium OS development squad is working on something called “internally consumer management,” which would be the central hub of the aforementioned recovery, location and wipe features. However, the exact line from his post mentions that the devs are merely “thinking” about adding the feature.
At the very least though, it’s much more than a concept that’s being tossed around by Google, and concrete evidence of “internally consumer management” currently exists.
“To see it, you’ll need to switch to Dev channel, turn on Dev mode, run chrome with the experimental command line switch¹ –enable-consumer-management (not a flag there) and go to chrome://settings. Since this is still work in progress, clicking on the “Enroll” button won’t do anything yet though ;).”
This comes after reports revealed that Google is working on making Chrome OS-powered devices more functional when they’re not connected to the Internet. Making them easier to find when lost, wipe when necessary, and lock when you’re away from your Chrome OS device will only serve to please consumers and potential buyers even more.
“As the ecosystems evolve, more and more developers are writing apps using Chrome APIs so they work offline,” said Caesar Sengupta, who is Google’s VP of product management for Chromebooks. “The platform has evolved and keeps improving. It is an OS that updates every six weeks. It keeps getting better.”
