This can happen if somehow sync got enabled when you signed in.

Sync kicked in, noticed a mismatch between your current setup and the one you had set up many years ago while testing the “sign into chrome” process and set your setting to the one in the cloud.

It’s caught me out a couple of times too.

Sync is disabled by Corporate IT by default. Not suggesting any malevolence, just wanted to check whether anyone else experienced a similar suspicious event as well.

Curious now about how exactly your Corporate IT team is disabling sync by default. Especially given the change as described. Possible to elaborate?

No IT staff in my shop. And the last 3 version upgrades have removed all my extensions, while trying to force the Google Drive extension on my installation. So the thing is, I’m heavily reliant on 1Password, and force uninstalling that extension has made Chrome useless to me. I refuse to reinstall my extensions again and I refuse to log in to Chrome to have my extensions synced. If they want to break my browser on autopilot, they can fuck off.

This sounds like a bug. Could you please file it at https://crbug.com/new?

Send me a check for my rate and I’ll do it.

I updated Chromium to version 69 on a personal debian 9.5, but it didn't touch any of my settings nor removed any installed extensions.

I don't (and never did) log into Chromium with my Google account however, so no syncing is happening.

That didn't happen to me.

Happened to me as well (with no corporate IT around)