Product Updates Based on Your Feedback
blog.google
blog.google
I figured Google would do something cosmetic (again, that's all that I think they really needed to do) to clear up the misconceptions here, but they've added a Matthew Green switch (which is what we all need to call it from now on). That's better than I'd hoped for.
Thanks!
With G Cookies also deleted, I may wonder "Why is my picture in the top right but no Google services are using it??". To us, it's clear that chrome sign-in is different from google sign-in, but to others, it may not be.
The logical thing to do, if your real aim is to have browser sign in state reflect cookie state, is to sign out the browser when someone clears their cookies.
That would make total sense to users.
I think this is clear evidence that Google made this change to keep more users signed into Google so they can collect more of your data without telling you.
Problem solved?
I could be mistaken, however, so I'm curious - what data does Google collect without telling the user, at least by making that data collection transparent?
I highly doubt the common person knows what a cookie is, let alone how to clear them.
A simple solution would be to add an extra step when clearing cookies that asks if you would like to stay signed into your Google session and clear or keep those cookies based on your selection.
That’s why people are complaining - they see that google clearly wants to privilege their own sites and logins in chrome and push the users to always be signed in with google across any site. Great for google, bad for user privacy and the open web.
What happened to their very vocal concern over net neutrality from last year?
But the fact that they are different things is precisely the reason why they should remain separate, not conflated into one soggy, confusing mess.
Not so much from a privacy angle but from more of a 'Chrome has lots its way' angle.
A lot of our software's more complex interfaces are Chrome-first since its faster to develop - yesterday was the first time I made a serious consideration to change that approach.
Glad to see they are listening to user feedback and reacting quickly.
I consider an opt-out as paying lip service to the feedback. Clearly they feel the default is more important than the generated angst. Reaction clearly needs to be even stronger to affect real change. An opt-in (e.g. a dialog on next Google login from Chrome asking for feature enable) is a compromise, an opt-out is to appease the temporarily upset while keeping all that they added in place and defaulted.
This is not an olive branch, don't accept it, condemn the continued incremental marriage of Google browser+services, and continue to move on and de-google yourself where you reasonably can.
Much more common, though, I'd say, is the type of user who will accept whatever the default is, because they just don't care.
Compare: the organ-donor registry. When it's opt-in, most people don't opt in. When it's opt-out, most people don't opt out. Most people just don't care.
If you think something is good for people, you have to consider the large group of users who don't want to put in the time/energy to evaluate whether the thing is good for them, but just want the program to shut up and do what it does by default—whatever that is.
Most people don't know it exists or that they have an option. You cannot care about something if you don't know it's there.
Most people won't know that these chrome features exist. Most people don't go digging through options and settings, they just download chrome and go, go, go.
When I flush all cookies from my browser session, and open a new session, I am a new user to google's various tracking mechanism. If I am an authenticated google user, then I am not.
In other words, you had half of HN claiming to be leaving Chrome over something they had no reason to believe had any privacy implications, and in reality, has either 0, or really close to 0, actual privacy implications.
I made a claim about HN being a small group in the grand scheme, and someone countered by claiming that most users didn't understand what was changing. But I think the funny thing is that the average user, who had the understanding that "literally nothing" was changing, would have been closer to the truth of the situation than the average HN commenter.
Not to say that the result of the hullabaloo was bad, I actually think this set of updates only improves things over where they are now, but its still a really strange sequence of events.
This is kind of what I mean, you can't talk about this without hyperbole.
The whole point of the feature was just that:
1. “are you logged into your Google Account from the perspective of Gmail et al” is now the thing the browser chrome itself reports; and
2. you now need to be logged into your Google Account in the cookies sense for Chrome sync to function; logging out of your Google Account turns off Chrome sync.
Before, people could be in a state where they have Chrome sync enabled with foo@gmail, but are not logged into foo@gmail from a cookies perspective, and are potentially even logged into bar@gmail.
This is the state that has been eliminated—now, the browser chrome’s login state reflects your Google Account web-cookie login state, because they’re one-and-the-same; and every method that logs you out of your Google account from a web-cookie perspective, also logs you out of Chrome (and vice-versa.)
Consider the privacy implications of someone who logs out of Gmail, but is still logged into Chrome sync as said Gmail user; and then lets someone else use the computer. That is what is no longer possible.
It’s a privacy improvement targeted at the people who expect “logging out” of their Google account to be one unilateral action that frees a computer of all artifacts related to their original logging-in. Which, until recently, wasn’t true: if you originally logged in by entering your credentials into the “new Chrome profile wizard” (where they set up the credential as both your synnc and web-cookie credential), and then logged out of one, it wouldn’t affect the other.
That Google are announcing walking this back within days of release and publicity suggests some measure of the storms roiling the 'Plex presently.
For you, it may be a no-op, but for many users, it is a net increase in privacy (people who use multiple accounts or who use accounts on shared computers).
>That Google are announcing walking this back
Erm, sort of, I guess. There are some small changes.
What numbers, precisely, do you have on this? Because it sounds to me as if you're arguing from a position of ignorance.
There might be some benefit to the small number of users who 1) have multiple devices and 2) share one or more of those amongst several other people in the same account in ways that this Chrome feature ... might address. But this doesn't strike me as some overwhelmingly large use case.
The system for user separation on shared computers is called ... user accounts. Which every mainstream consumer operating system has supported for the past 17 years (Windows XP being the latecomer to this game.)
Otherwise, this is a broadening of Google's ever-expanding ingestion of user data, either directly or by way of one more (or an incremental series of) "small change". If I notice my enemy maneuvering me to his advantage, I counter that maneuver. In my case, it's meant uninstalling Chrome and Chromium from any systems on which that's possible.
(My much-regretted purchase some years ago of an Android tablet being the primary exception, though I'm resolved to not repeat that mistake, despite a dire lack of viable market options presently. Purism and Ubuntu may be nearing useful products.)
...small changes...
In the Universe in which I inhabit, Google specifically addressed user feedback and sign-in changes. I cannot find your characterisation of their announcement as accurate under any charitable interpretation.
Certainly, for you or I, user accounts (and incognito windows) solve most of the problems that this change fixed. But most users aren't you or I.
Therein lies the disagreement - Google thinks it is good for people to log in to Google services via their browser, and to always be logged in (it's certainly good for Google!), therefore they choose these defaults, opting in to login and to tracking.
Many disagree.
To fix this, the “remove cookies” button would also have to sign you out of chrome which would also feel weird from a UX perspective.
All in all I think this was just released a bit early before all UX edge cases could be tackled (or even discovered. Sometimes you find things only in wider rollouts)
Then maybe tying the Google state to the browser state was a mistake and should be reverted?
Heh, I wonder if the next privacy blunder from Google will make you further reconsider your "voluntary vendor lock-in" approach :)
I've been using Firefox as my main dev browser for years and it has a huge, practical advantage:
- Usually it Just Works in every mainstream browser (had one single case in the last year where it broke in another browser).
My colleagues who use Chrome has to fix QA bugs more often than me it seems ;-)
Bonus: Support a good cause (cross browser compability)
I fear that changes like this will eventually make it impossible to effectively explain to an average user even the basics of how the web works.
Also, in my (admittedly, n=1) experience, Sync was enabled automatically, perhaps because I had tried it at some point.
When the enemy of their enemy becomes their friend, the question then is who their common foe is. Microsoft is actively working to push the needle in the same direction as Google on ignoring and removing user choice in their products. An ex-Chrome dev at Microsoft defending dark patterns from his former team by mocking user concerns (as you are, with your "Matthew Green switch") is hardly an objective slam dunk.
Google is free to do integrate their online environment into their client, but it's dishonest to continue to call it a web browser much longer.
How did you expect them to announce a change they probably perceive as a minor UX improvement? Also this has been brewing for months in canary/beta, it's not like they actually snuck the change as you imply.
Just because you split a large change into a set of minor UX improvements and have different excuses for each individual change, that doesn't make the direction of travel any less damaging.
To be clear, the direction of travel is for Google to abuse their de-facto monopoly on search and browsers to own SSO across the web and track their users completely, at which point they will pretty much own your entire web experience (logins, browser history, maps, news, search, tracking, analytics - all this data will form a huge moat making it hard to compete and hard to resist decisions made by google about the web) - even if you don't use them they'll own the experience of the majority of your customers. This is why these small changes are so pernicious, and why people have reacted badly to them. This is why people reacted so badly to AMP.
This is not an argument over technicalities or quibbles over UX, this is a fundamental question of who owns the web.
Google have built up a lot of trust over the years by keeping the browser independent of their other operations, and making great technical progress with Chrome, but these changes (and others like starting to abuse their search monopoly by privileging certain google results) show that is not going to last - they are now at the monetising phase of their lifecycle, and nothing can stop it - a huge corporation has a momentum of its own.
No - because they are free, ubiquitous, and often installed by default. People choose their browser as they would choose a hat, from the limited selection available.
I don’t want to be logged in in my browser at all
I mean I know it from the companies perspective of course. They want to consolidate as much data about you as possible. And tie you into their ecosystem.
But what is the user facing benefit? Syncing your bookmarks across devices?
Syncing bookmarks, recently opened tabs, passwords, autofill(?). These are genuine benefits when you're working with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. Whether they're worth the cost of data mining is another matter of course.
These are genuine benefits when you're working
with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets.
The thought that Google wants to send my 'recently opened tabs' to their servers makes me shudder. So they get the whole browsing history of every one of their users? Of all the pages that have nothing to do with them?
Same with passwords. So they have a gigantic database with all of their users passwords for all the services the users use? Even those totally unrelated to Google?
I'm looking at something on my desktop, have to go somewhere, so I just send the tabs to my phone and continue consuming. If I forget to do so, I can also use the url bar to search through common history, so that I could enter a few words from the title and go back to that article.
That being said, I personally wouldn't trust Google to do this, so I use Firefox that I believe encrypts data client-side by default.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139
Perhaps you have never visited passwords.google.com :-)
> Passphrases are optional. Your synced data is always protected by encryption when it's in transit.
Data is protected when in transit and passphrase is optional. How is this a good feature?
When you use a passphrase, your data will presumably be encrypted with your passphrase and thus only be visible to you with knowledge of the passphrase. Not even Google could see the data while it would be stored on their servers.
Encryption during transit means that no bad actors like hackers, unscrupulous ISP's or overzealous governments can access your data _while_ it travels over the wires towards Google's servers but Google can still do what it wants with your data.
(I work for Google but on nothing remotely related to this.)
They claim sync data is end-to-end encrypted. However they would already have your browsing history if you have address bar suggestions enabled.
Distributed, and it pays for itself using AdSense.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
Here's one way: there's not a singular axis that users wanting sync and users not wanting sync can be placed on and compared.
The other poster expressed how the feature sucked for their purposes. But the feature wasn't made to punish them, it was made after evaluating the preferences of many users, which is what my question is getting at.
Specifically as to sync: I would love to be able to sync certain elements of browser state between my systems.
Not between one of my systems, some arbitrary third party of questionable trust and intentions, and another of my systems. But directly between my systems.
Google actively thwart this.
A feature of most early browsers was the ability to save bookmarks to a file, and import that elsewhere. By slight extension, a browser session or tab state can be saved, either directly, or as bookmarks.
Chrome does not do this, either at all, or on all platforms. It's most resistant to this on the consumption-only platform of Android.
This has been a major point of frustration to me for a year and a half as I've been wanting to dump user state from one system to another, without Google intermediating that exchange for me. I've found no means of accomplishing this.
That is one element of the tyranny of the minimum viable user, as well as of Google cattle-prodding its users into the feed chutes.
So... you're happy that they're giving you the option to turn it off then, right? I mean, you appear to concede that someone users want this. You want the option to turn if off, which you're getting. That seems like good news.
Except your tone doesn't seem to match your logic.
FWIW: I use Firefox too. But... I mean come on folks. They messed up, they're fixing it. The obsession with hatred and flamage is getting a little out of control.
The next step in this equation is even more frustrating - people who's default workflow to signing in is to click 'I forgot my password', and proceed through those steps to instil a new password. And then the cycle continues.
How is that ironic? People who can't remember their password would have the most reason to let an external apparatus save it for them.
I understand healthy skepticism of Google, but essentially claiming password managers (which is what this feature is) are bad, for the sake of criticizing Google, is bad.
A good password manager is a great tool and more secure than a few simple memorable passwords. But when I use it, I'm making a conscious trade-off between memorable passwords and secure ones, but usually I'll at least need to memorise a master.
I'm fact just thinking about it - if Chrome's signin affinity is turned on, and I have chosen "remember me", AND I use the password manager, isn't that effectively equivalent to having your entire password manager with a "remember me"?
That's also one of the situations it's most useful in, as having your saved passwords already present on your phone when you try to log into a site you generally don't from your phone is extremely helpful.
If the company supplying these features are forcefully making these decisions on behalf of me, I can assume that there are other intentions and motivations for providing these services to me for "free".
They've achieved so much ubiquity, that their offerings are becoming incompatible with an open web.
I do have a Firefox account which syncs up my passwords, history, etc. so in a sense I'm still logged into the browser.
I do trust Mozilla more than I do Google with my personal data, though.
One more reason to go with Firefox.
"The security model of Firefox Sync ensures that your sync data is encrypted before it ever leaves your machine, and that the password to unlock this encryption is never transmitted to the server. Not even Mozilla can access your sync data, so while we transmit it all over TLS for additional security, we do not depend on the confidentiality of TLS to keep your data safe."
https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/how-firefox-sync-keeps-your-...
"When you sync Chrome with your Google Account, we use your browsing data to improve and personalize your experience within Chrome. You can also personalize your experience on other Google products, by allowing your Chrome history to be included in your Google Web & App Activity."
I actually value and use sync. Google sees most of by browsing through page-hosted GA anyway! But at best, this was really lazy product management that smacks of condescension about less technical users (don't worry your head about these cookies). And at worst, it's testing the waters on some really nefarious strategies.
{ "SyncDisabled": true }
into /etc/chromium/policies/managed/test_policy.json (for debian linux) seems to do the trick for now, unsure how long it lasts...
see: https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#SyncDi...
Given that, their reaction on their blog seems above and beyond to me.
Edit: Downvoters, reply with how this is incorrect instead of downvoting.
OK but I expect that most Chrome users feel different about that. Most are probably happy that this UI change makes things less confusing.
Second, and probably more important, software is about trust. [...] And what google did is to shatter that trust by sneaking that change discretely.
Why did the UI change shatter trust for you? It doesn't enable syncing so I don't see what the big deal is. With syncing out of the equation, I can imagine that you don't like being logged in in the browser for aesthetic reasons or something, but to have one's trust shattered?
I hope this is a wake up call that privacy implications need to be seriously considered during product design (even if the intent was better UX), and hidden changes without any UI/notice is going to make issues blow up far more than if there was clear in-app communication.
To be honest, it’s best to use an independent company for your internet browser. Google’s incentives and business model no longer matches web browsing for someone who cares about privacy.
Chrome was introduced by Google with the idea of improving performance of webbrowsers in general so they could do more with web-apps. That did seem somewhat reasonable at the time.
But since Chrome became the market leader, the incentives have changed.
And KHTML team in a cave.
Do you mean "I haven't used *Chrome" ..."? Otherwise I don't understand what you're trying to say.
Google software seems to be chrome-optimized, but it's usually only slightly slower on Firefox - it still works.
Maybe am too cynical, but I think it would be a wake up call to hide such features better in the future. This is Google we're talking about here.
There's just too much to keep up with at this point.
I'm happy about this change, it's a big move in the right direction. But it doesn't give me any confidence for the future. It's crazy that users have to do this every single release. It can't continue like this.
I have no idea anymore what it would take to get me to switch back to Chrome or to start recommending it to friends and family. I feel like Google is actively training technical communities to distrust them. It's going to turn into some kind of Pavlovian response.
Edit: Permalink to the relevant comment: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=883038...
The last that I heard, it was temporarily removed in Chrome 69, and `www` would be reintroduced in 70. Unless things have changed again since then, `m` was the only change that was actually shelved.
One week it's the domain hiding, another week it's cookie clearing. Who knows what Google is planning to change next time? It's not sustainable for us to go reactive every month.
There's an awfully big disconnect if the makers of the world's most-used web browser are routinely trying to change it in ways that users force them to immediately revert. That's not what good stewards do.
Just look at how they do product naming. How many times have we seen Google or Facebook launch projects with the same name as an existing project and just use their size to steamroll over refernce to the existing work?
E.g. the Go programming language or Facebook’s Flow checker for starters.
It's not exactly a secret. Go download Canary and see what's in the pipeline.
You can do that, but it's time consuming and exhausting. You're better off switching browsers.
I still think you're misunderstanding. The problem is that Google as an organization has the incentive to pull shady shit. It may be noticed, but watching Reddit/HN to see if your browser, which should protect you/be trustworthy, is pulling shady stuff, or whether you may've missed a story of it doing so is still exhausting and keeps you wondering.
A recent example: Hackers hate the idea of removing "www". Why? Because it's less accurate and we love accuracy. We think about what happens to the DNS if the www isn't a CNAME for the root, and how this isn't technically accurate.
Real users don't care. The UI is cleaner and make important information like what domain they're actually on more pronounced. This may help reduce phishing attacks and make URLs more legible.
Integrating sync is the same way. I'm not surprised that hackers hate it, but end users will appreciate the convenience. Android had the feature for years already.
We need to get out of this bubble and stop assuming we're the core audience. It isn't evil to design for somebody that isn't us.
> Thanks for the feedback so far. We plan to collect additional feedback, particularly about the enterprise use case, before launching the feature. We will not be launching the "www" elision in M70.
Note: “before launching” the feature post-M70.
As you correctly point out, it’s not necessarily cancelled forever.
The statement applies to any delay within the range of "soon" and "not forever".
Many of the complaints that Chrome has gotten are not specific to technical communities. People were mad about `www` not because the technical communities have a thing for seeing the subdomains, but because there's a risk that average Joes can be phished when they're removed, and because on some domains the removal makes technical support for people like Joe harder. Similarly, the Web Audio complaints were not merely that the technical community wanted more control, it was that the changes broke the web for non-technical users in a way that commercially advantaged Google's own properties.
Secondly, Google's external PR has never taken this stance. Google invests a lot into interfacing with the dev community and positioning Chrome as a dev-friendly browser. I very much doubt that any Chrome dev on Twitter would agree with what you're saying. They would say that Chrome is trying to be a browser for both casual and advanced users.
As long as Google advertises Chrome that way, I don't see the problem with the technical community demanding a certain level of consideration. How many people on HN use Chrome (or at least did a week ago ;))? If Chrome isn't designed for people like them, than it seems like the obvious solution is for any tech savvy communities to en masse switch to Firefox and do the majority of their development/testing there.
But again, most of the changes that people are mad about aren't tech-specific concerns. I don't use Chrome for daily browsing; I'm mad that Google made a change that made it easier for them to spy on my parents. I'm responsible for protecting them. I'm responsible for mitigating Chrome's technical problems when they impact nontechnical users and customers that I care about.
This time, somebody decided the only clean path out was to be responsive: to make changes which reflected community concern and to tell people about them
Which I think, is good. I vastly prefer the google which tells people it listened, to the one which says it listens but doesn't tell us whats happening to the inputs we give.
(thats the one which lies behind any three-dots 'send feedback' hooks in almost any google app or s/w I use: I never get the sense anyone reads it, cares about it)
Communication about it seems to be. The actual code changes seem like they'll roll out in um... 3 or so months from now?
Looking again, yep mid-October. So, no rush then. A couple of weeks worth of extra data collection it is then.
When company and customer interest are misaligned this is the result. There are plenty of cases where a strong leader in the company with a strong ideology can hold this stuff back, but companies normally outlast those individuals and eventually there's nobody left to stand in the way.
It's wonderful that we were able to make enough noise and fuss that the cost/benefit shifted sufficiently but this will happen again, and then again, and so on... And eventually, we'll be tired of yelling or won't be able to yell loud enough.
Vote with you attention and your data and your money. Switch to Fastmail or Protonmail. Use Firefox or Brave. Buy a System76 laptop instead of yet another not-so-great-for-developers-anymore Apple macbook pro. Choose these options even if they aren't as good because if we don't support the handful of companies who are trying to do something other than gobble up all of our attention and data we're in for a really dark future for the web.
They're building in features that integrate their browser into their web pages.
As far as I'm aware no other major browser holder has done anything of that sort, but I'm probably missing some examples.
I imagine more and more so called convenient features might come where Chrome can suddenly install entire Windows apps, clean my files, and replace my OS. Then again, why not. Who am I to tell Google how to compete, maybe they can replace Windows with something better by gradually bloating up Chrome into an OS inside an OS.
If the HN backlash is anything to go by, a lot of people see it the same way as you (me included).
Every company will act in it's best interest not ours, particularly in the case of Google who are blatantly building out a vision of what they want the web to be for 1 singular purpose: to more closely monitor you for the purpose of selling your online activity to the highest bidder.
This much influence being concentrated is bad for the web.
Viva la revolución!
HN isn't representative of most users of Chrome. I doubt that we qualify as "a lot" to Google. An extremely vocal minority, at best.
Once you annoy enough of the tech literate, word will start to spread. Slowly, then quickly. How do you think Chrome got its foothold to begin with?
And about how Chrome got a foothold in the first place, I distinctly remember Google agressively advertising their own product on their search engine page, and bundling the binary with everything under the sun (Adobe Reader, anti-virus, etc...). Every time you installed software, there was a good chance Chrome was included with it. Tech influencers had their part in the success of Chrome, but it definitely wasn't the only factor, or maybe even the most important one.
I really want to know who the internal champion was for getting the cookies to be perma-stored in the first place. It has to be someone relatively high up and I’m genuinely curious how high it goes.
My cynicism kicks in and I feel like they know exactly what they’re doing, but the bottom line is more important than anything including causing a PR storm on HN and tech blogs.
Strip down emperor’s clothes and truly reveal the nature of big corporations and their greed to ruin everything for the benefit of the shareholders and their bonus targets - ethics, privacy and environment.
Perhaps I have a problem with extreme levels of cynicism.
Just look at the state of Android. Try being a cell phone OEM who wants to use Android but without Google integration. Impossible.
Tell that to Vivo, Oppo, Honor, Huawei, Xiaomi, Meizu, OnePlus, Lenovo, Qiku, Smartisan, Amazon, etc.
Not in China. Some of them have an "International ROM" with play store, but not because they have to, just for non-Chinese users convenience.
- Auto sign in and the "Google account indicator": this is almost certainly the result of discussions between the Chrome security team (security indicators, phishing, etc) and Google UX requests. Heck, they even say that the indicator was motivated by user research around session management.
- Tracking: I'm not sure what extra tracking was added to Chrome beyond the existing telemetry they've had since the beginning of the project.
- Google cookies: explained above - a reasonable idea at some manager or UX designer's local scope that got misinterpreted.
If they really wanted to sneak in goodies to supercharge their ad business, it would look a lot worse (and be a lot less obvious) than this. For instance, there's nothing stopping them* from automatically enabling Chrome Sync and removing the option for encrypted syncs tomorrow... which is another issue, but a different scope of discussion.
* Aside from their entire legal department, of course.
How can you have one without the other? Google services exist to drive advertising. Anything to make a Google service better for the user has a corresponding impact on Google's ad business.
We deeply appreciate all of the passionate users who have engaged with us on this. Chrome is a diverse, worldwide community, and we’re lucky to have users who care as much as you do. Keep the feedback coming.
There'd probably be a blog post about how Chrome 70 will automatically create fresh Google cookies to keep you logged in to the browser after you delete them.
Maybe I'm just being pedantic and there's no real-world difference, but I'm a little more okay with the browser creating new cookies whenever they're cleared vs not clearing cookies when asked.
Not entirely okay with it, mind you. Especially since browser logins are now two-way.
It must certainly is a stupid idea.
> We’re also going to change the way we handle the clearing of auth cookies. In the current version of Chrome, we keep the Google auth cookies to allow you to stay signed in after cookies are cleared. We will change this behavior that so all cookies are deleted and you will be signed out.
[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... [2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... [3] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... [4] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/...
Many people _purposefully_ don't want to sign into Chrome. The change suddenly signed them in, without notice or confirmation. That's problematic.
Nice to at least see they're making it opt-out, but the damage has already been done.
I've been using Gmail without signing into Chrome. Post-update, I am signed in, but sync is still off.
I just tested again now, and took screenshots this time, and once again, it didn't automatically turn on Sync.
I wouldn't use those words. I would replace that with "when the backlash is large enough"
Also I read several comments in that thread about how all of that feedback was pointless because the "vast majority of users don't care."
This type of comments always come up after anything a bad company does. You don't need the majority of users to force a change. In fact no movement ever starts with a majority.
That said, Google can no longer be trusted not to screw over Chrome users in the future. Trying to track users this aggressively and then only backing down after a large backlash doesn't really tell me that Google will be playing nice from now on.
I tried to switch to Firefox, but was stymied by a bug where Firefox consumes 100%+ CPU on MacBook Pro Retinas.
Firefox is basically unusable with this bug; Facebook takes forever to load, and even Reddit r/firefox shows "A webpage is slowing down your browser" bar at the top.
Active relevant bugs are here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522
But apparently this has been going on for 2+ years and Mozilla hasn't been able to fix it.
Given rMBPs (I would think) would be a fairly large market share of people who work at Mozilla or use Firefox, it's both concerning and surprising that a bug of this proportion has gone on so long.
Edit: Jeff from Mozilla has reached out. I sent him a perf log and a screenshot. Tracking here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1494186
Edit: For people who want to compare notes: High Sierra 10.13.6, Firefox 62.0.2, resolution is set to "Default for display" (which I think does mean it's doing interpolation of some sort). Automatic graphics switching is enabled. I don't have any trouble watching YouTube videos.
I've got a 15" "late 2013" rMBP, set display options to "more space." I've got a total of 45 tabs open between a couple different windows (I use the userChrome hack to re-enable multiple tab rows.) Cycled between tabs, refreshed, navigated around FB, GMail, etc. Can't get the CPU to do anything out of the ordinary.
I'm not sure what to say. I'm sure the issue is real, but it seems like we're missing something in the triage. There has to be something else that makes a difference.
Most developers in their early 20s seems plausible, but even there, I surveyed my team’s younger cohort, and it was less than 50%.
Facebook has also replaced forums for our industry (cell phone/computer repair), so it's how we find out about the latest trends and innovations. Yesterday I used a document posted on a private FB group to fix 3 2011 15" MacBook Pros with failing GPUs (previously considered "unfixable.")
For the industry and business I'm in, there's no substitute.
Private groups on FB can be more discerning about their membership, which is also what makes them interesting.
Many of the cell phone repair groups I'm in require you to have a repair business, so the groups don't get flooded with what they call "plz bro" posts. (i.e. "How do I fix an iPhone screen?" beginner posts.)
It also forms a tighter community; we pretty much all know each other on there, so we refer business back and forth a lot, and use Messenger heavily to buy, sell, and just chat about really obscure or weird repairs that come in the door.
If you're actually experiencing 100% cpu usage, post a profile using https://perf-html.io/ and I can try tell you why.
1) Pick a rMBP. Any one.
2) Set display options - "more space" under System Preferences.
3) Run Firefox. Load any website. No extensions; safe mode doesn't matter.
4) 100%+ CPU, fans kick up and run high, system gets hot and slows to a crawl.
Chrome and Safari run totally fine under the same conditions.
It's documented pretty thoroughly in the first Bugzilla link I posted; the second one is an offshoot where they're trying to solve this specific issue. If you do happen to work at Mozilla, would really appreciate your help escalating.
EDIT: I now have a perf file showing significant issues when clicking on a YouTube video. It gives an error when trying to upload it to the site, but if you contact me through email (in my HN profile), I can send it over.
Edit: Actually I just checked and the Windows 7 machine doesn't do it any more. I'm not sure if maybe a Firefox update fixed that here. I'll double check at work tomorrow too
2) My display options are set to "more space"
3) I loaded this hackernews thread.
4) Firefox and it's child processes are using <1% cpu.
If I aggressively scroll this page I can push the cpu usage up. We have a variety of fixes in the pipeline that will help with this (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265824). That being said, only 4.7% of our users are on MacOS so it's more difficult to justify prioritizing work specific to that platform.
If that second number is substantially higher (and I personally suspect it is, but I don't have data backing that up) I think it would be very reasonable for Mozilla to prioritize MacOS. Getting web developers to use firefox makes firefox work better for everyone because it makes more sites work well with firefox.
On that note, one of the key motivators behind WebRender (our new graphics backend) is that it provides hardware acceleration across all platforms, including mac (whereas our current Direct2D acceleration works only on Windows). So Mac graphics performance should generally improve once we get that shipped.
However, I would like to ask... 4.7% translates to how many millions of people?
Draw from that what you may, but I bet that dynamic is happening in other places.
Why?
On the flip side, I've had a recurring bug in Chrome (until very recently) where for any long running session the Browser process will consume 100% of 1 core. I've had it across multiple machines and profiles, including a completely clean profile with no extensions - I've never managed to be able to nail down the common elements.
Firefox with one tab (with gmail opened) takes 20% CPU. (and a helper process "FirefoxCP Web Content", which takes 50% CPU, wow.)
Chrome with some 20 tabs, ~4-5% with all its processes (but a lot of ram, which I am fine with)
This is for a 2015 13-inch Macbook pro.
Personally, browsers don't need users to signin. They can sync data laterally with other instances. I suppose Google hasn't heard of bonjour.
These marketing / ad tech companies masquerading as consumer products will inevitably drift toward more invasion of privacy and user exploitation.
Don't every freaking website have "Keep Me Signed In" (Don't use this on shared computer) message for decades already?
I have learned an important fact that Ad business is rotten at the core - meaning it has direct conflicts with users. Therefore, I can never come to trust any Ads businesses: Facebook, Google, Snapchat, etc and recently Adobe and Microsoft.
I’m disgusted at the state of advertisement in modern society. It ruined cable, radio, social media, road sides, magazines and the very fabric of society. Turns out that our attention has a huge price tag.
Now Google is the portal. I’m done with it.
For example, imagine a company that allows you to search the internet without ads but charging say $2.99/month fee to use it. Even if I am willing to pay, the search accuracy and ability for a small company to compete with google is nearly impossible.
So here we are. Perhaps I’ll switch to DuckDuckGo. They recently got funding and I feel like they’re “cool” right now until if they grow huge and we are back to square one.
This is the endless corporate loop we are stuck with.
DuckDuckGo's primary selling point is privacy. If they infringe on that, they die.
Also, I just switched to an iPhone again after years of using Android, for similar reasons. Apple is scary but right now I want to distance myself from Google as much as possible.
That's true of any endless loop or endless cycle—they could all be aborted by a sufficiently large asteroid.
IE Firefox
2009 Q4 66.42% 21.13%
2003 Q2 94.43% 2.22%
Why do you think the search engine is unable to build a model leveraging a huge number of free developers?
Blekko did get volunteers to help edit our slashtags, and duckduckgo used to have volunteers help out with their duckduckhacks.
You'll need some people too probably.
But there is a huge difference now with search. Google owns one of the mobile platforms and pays the other dominant platform over $2 billion a year to be the primary search engine.
It doesn't even require payment. Even if you don't do any user targeting at all, insurance companies will transport a Scrooge McDuck money bin full of gold bullion to your location if you can show their car insurance ads to all the people who search for "car insurance" etc. Google itself operated this way for many years.
What you need is some competitive advantage over the incumbent.
I suspect a good way to do this is to make products for more technical users. Support powerful filters and scripting and regular expressions. Expose the internals of how it works to the user. Publish the source code and let people improve it -- do for search what Red Hat does for operating systems. It's a great model here because the cost of doing the indexing is still a moat even if the search code itself is completely open.
Big companies concentrate on the mass market. They've gone so far in the direction of making things so simple and generic that literally everyone can use it that they're leaving open an opportunity for someone to capture the subset of the market willing to suffer the complexity that comes from a more powerful interface.
You don't need 99% of the users, 5% is quite sufficient. If you make that you're worth a billion dollars and have the resources to make further improvements that allow you to compete in the wider market.
I’m a huge fan of publicly funded media such as NPR and your local public radio station.
Would you rather have the children decide what they should learn in school, or the injured decide how their wound should be dressed? A fundamental aspect of our society's advancement is that we have become specialists: we almost all wear socks but very few of us would know how to make them. And even if we could, we wouldn't be able to make them quite so efficiently.
The poor—or the middle class, or the rich—shouldn't have to decide how they are being informed about the world any more than they should be expected to decide which type of stitching is used to assemble their socks.
Can we agree that mentally stable adult humans, generally, should have some agency and responsibility to choose how they consume media?
I'm not even going to respond to your second paragraph because it's almost insulting that you thought it necessary to ask.
I'm cautiously optimistic that a utility token like BAT, or some other way that people can provide micro-payments for content will win in the end. I'd gladly pay $0.25 to read a well written article on the Internet, so long as it went to the creator and didn't fund the advertising machine.
By the way, for example of not-ad-driven internet you might look at China, where podcasts is $7 bln business (direct fees and subscriptions), video blogging is of course full of celebrities promoting big brands, but for the main part is still about direct "gifts" from viewers to tens of thousands of bloggers.
It's a straightforward extrapolation from data.
> We are living through a period of rapid global poverty reduction. According to recent estimates, high, sustained growth across most of the developing world has helped nearly half a billion people escape $1.25-a-day poverty between 2005 and 2010. Never before have so many people been lifted out of poverty over such a brief period.
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/two-trends-in-global-pove...
500,000,000 people, 5 years.
First, from what I can find, the average click-through rate online for ads is something like 2%. I suspect it's even worse for smaller blogs and independent sources that don't advertise using Google.
Let's assume you're getting a dollar every time someone clicks on an ad. I think that's high, but whatever. If we were to get everyone to start paying for content, that would translate to it costing around 2 cents for you to look at a page. If you're reading 30 articles from your favorite site every month, that's 60 cents a month. So people talk about how expensive content would be, but from what I can see it probably wouldn't take a huge amount of money to give sites the same amount of support that they're getting right now.
Secondly, I think it's at least a little bit problematic to say that ads make content free. The only reason why any company would ever pay to put an ad on someone's content is if they expect to make that money back, either by encouraging consumers to buy a different product than they normally would have, or by encouraging them to buy more of a given product than they otherwise would have. Statistically speaking, you are paying for content that is ad supported. If you weren't, nobody would put ads on that content.
And I realize that sounds a little bit like splitting hairs, but I get tired of this idea that ads don't have a consumer cost. If you completely get rid of ads through ad blockers, and by not listening to radio or watching live TV, and by not using any service that doesn't give you a purchase option... it will not take long until you become re-accustomed to "normal" levels of advertising. And once you are accustomed to that, you will immediately notice on venturing back into the ad-filled world just how much time and attention and mindspace that ads demand from you.
Everyone believes that they're atypical, and that ads don't encourage them to spend more, or to buy branded products instead of generic ones, or to treat practical products like status symbols. Most people are wrong about their own abilities though. Most people are affected by advertising. That doesn't mean that advertising is evil, there are lots of good use-cases for advertising -- but it does mean that ads aren't free.
It would be very hard to gather data on this, but I suspect that if you tracked the average spending habits of people who were inundated with ads, their monthly spending would increase more than the cost of buying a few magazine subscriptions. I suspect that's even true of most people on Hackernews. If anyone has data, they're welcome to prove me wrong though.
There are lot of people working on it (including my startup) to solve the problem that are fraught with ad-tech in general and we are making progress but there is lot of inertia in the industry when it comes to change.
I want to see different vendors when I decide to buy something. But when I’m on Instagram and browsing pictures, please don’t sell me a chef’s knife or a guitar.
I have no experience in marketing and advertisement. But from a user standpoint, I want to look through Yellow Pages and Vendor catalogs. Not bombarded with ads all the time. What are your thoughts?
I feel like Advertisement should be a “pull” rather than “push” model.
"Push" advertising can work great as long as user is not bombarded with too many ads. Also, ad creative copy needs to be exceptional to make it work. In real work, a good example of "push" advertising model is billboard advertising or print advertising in magazines. Most people don't mind Apple ads on billboards (where they spend lot of $$) because they are done really well. Unfortunately, in push model on digital advertising is not always great due to poor quality of creatives or flashy/obstructive ads that distract users.
Instagram does advertising surprisingly well but that's may by my opinion since I have seen lot of bad stuff in ad-tech. My GF works in textiles/product design world but loves ads on Instagram since she follows certain type of accounts related to work and she gets very context driven ads, which she loves. Similar to ads that you get in high end fashion magazine. Believe it or not lot of people buy magazines like Vogue for their advertising too. You can always mute ads from accounts that you don't find relevant.
Some apps/companies are going towards providing ad free option (like Spotify) for users who don't want ads at all, I think that will get more and more traction in coming years..
Your example is still a "Push" ad. You're pushing your stuff without being asked. Looking for information on a topic is not a request for ads on that topic.
A pull ad would be an ad catalogue, or a website built purely for ads where people would go to explore for new things/services/whatever if, and only if, they wanted to.
I'd be genuinely excited to learn otherwise.
Consider the iPhone advertising campaign back in '07, modern smartphones would have taken another decade to take hold if Apple hadn't done such a masterful job telling people that a new category was being born.
Sometimes people will advocate 'doing your own research'. That is at odds with the fact that most people are incapable (not just disinterested in, but incapable) of evaluating all the decisions they make daily basis. Research the decisions you understand, copy someone else for the rest is the best strategy.
In that environment, even a good product needs some exposure to raise awareness that it exists. The game is more complicated than advertisers hypnotising an otherwise unwilling public.
Perhaps it doesn't happen in the software but I work in Semiconductor industry. You can ask the same to anyone say in Fabrics industry or Electronics and they'll say the same. Trade shows are amazing and that's how advertising should be done - with respect, mutual interest and consent.
Despite all the billion dollars ML systems with gazillion of factors analyzed on petabytes of data, all we've got is 'hey, you googled for a 10uA accuracy bench multimeter yesterday! now for two weeks we will show you all the $15 multimeters ever existed! (and most of them will be the same two Chinese models with different OEM labels)'.
Look at this (don't worry, it's short one-page) thread for example of how it might be instead - https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/benchtop-dmm-advise-n... - and what if the message from Tek engineer that closed a deal was actually advertising? He just posted a link to relevant appnote, that's it. What if automatical advertising system showed the same link to the same appnote as an advertising to the same user?
Brand/product awareness. Sometimes you don't know what you want. And sometimes you don't know if certain product/solution exists for the problem you are facing. Believe it or not, one of my favorite apps is MyFitnessPal, I downloaded it via an ad because I was looking was health/fitness category product but never heard of MFP (few years ago before they were popular). I thought I will give it a shot and downloaded and solved my problems plus I discovered few more use cases for my health/fitness related interests.
Another example (rather misconception), "Google became famous via word of mouth". No, Google had prominent ad placement (aka powered by Google which was part of their contract) as a part of their deal with providing search on AOL/Yahoo portals. When non-tech savvy users searched on these portals they were exposed to Google and were exposed to much more superior search engine than that was available.
Of course advertisements lead to spread of new products. That just means they work, not that they are necessarily beneficial to users. Every advertiser might believe that their product is beneficial to the user and therefore they are helping the consumer by telling them about the product. In reality that cannot be true for most advertisers.
BackBlaze - I think is s great service.
Hover: Anything is better than Godaddy.
Linode: I’ve recommended it to people who wanted cheap hosting.
Casper: recommended to a college student. His parents were happy with it.
SquareSpace - anytime someone wants a website, I recommend them first.
Ting - I recommended someone check it out.
Betterment - I did my own research but I first heard about it on a podcast.
Synology: on my list when my hard drive fills up.
Eero - I don’t need it, but if someone asked me what to get, it would be the top of mind.
I think that illustates the OP's point well; you don't have need or experience of the product, but the psychological infiltration of ads means that you'll recommend it anyway.
"Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky." (And that was in 1999. The 2018 version would have to be extended: "And in our email, and in the Windows start menu, and in our phones, and on shopping carts and subway turnstiles, and maps, and video games, and in photo albums, and even inside of other ads. And the ads watched you as much as you watched them. But not our dreams.")
In the novel's world, each year is subsidized by a specific corporate sponsor for tax revenue. The years of Subsidized Time are: Year of the Whopper Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade for Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems for Home, Office or Mobile Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.) Year of Glad
Anyway, 90-95 % of users will probably just stick with the default value because they either don't know about the option or don't care enough to change it, hence from Google's perspective introducing it won't hurt their data collection efforts that much while they can at least say they did something to protect people's privacy. This is why I think "privacy by default" is so important, and it's sad to see that some of the largest players in the data collection space still ignore it.
Matthew Green's blogpost made it sound like Google had access to everybody's authentication cookies and cleartext passwords. Comments on both HN and cryptographyengineering.com show that this is what users actually believe now.
It certainly means that it's possible, but of course it was potentially possible before, and the code is, afaik, open source, so you're free to look and see if they really are.
As for non-tracking reasons why this change: it improves the us for users who use multiple accounts or share accounts on a single system.
Sometimes things are just because they want a more useful product.
Why? If this change doesn't impact privacy, why is having it opt out not privacy by default? How is a no-op from a privacy perspective privacy-anything?
Also, privacy by default means that no unnecessary data is created or shared between systems without asking the user first, regardless of what the purpose of this data sharing is. The Chrome browser and the Google web services are two different things, and most users will not expect that the two accounts are automatically tied together. The nice thing to do here would be to simply ask the user before syncing the logins. I suspect that the long-term goal here is to tie the browser history and search queries of more users to their Google accounts, because that information is very valuable (but also highly sensitive).
"Oh whoops we got caught. We'll give the few upset people an extra check box to revert to old behavior. But luckily no one else will ever know."
I've currently got 6 different gmail accounts pinned. So which Google account am I supposed to be signed into Chrome for?
Do you still want to play with your users, Google? It's your product and your choice. Good night and good luck
I still love the rationale for this decision:
> Over the years, we’ve received feedback from users on shared devices that they were confused about Chrome’s sign-in state.
Their solution: Let's add another state - the "sync" state - I'm sure this won't be confusing to users at all /s
Surprised to say that not much has changed with the move. I was able to find all my extensions in the firefox addons. Life continues
- Search
- Analytics
- Storage
- Android tracking
- Online video
- Chrome which is now becoming a portal to the GoogleWeb
I don't want any company to control this much of what I do online as a matter of principle.
At this point they're a victim of their own success.
Did users really need to explain this to Google? Perceptions of trustworthiness are based upon behavior, and this erodes that a bit. Not a massive amount, but enough to cast new features in a different light.
(The justification that 'most people will find this easier to understand' only goes so far and the fact it gets trotted out so often is itself concern. 'Being logged in everywhere makes your life easier!' Okay, ... and? Who else's life does it make easier and what are they gaining?)
Don't conflate Chrome sign in with any web page sign in - not even Google's own. Call that web page neutrality.
Also, I wonder if it will allow signing in with one account and syncing to another as it used to before the current mess. My use case: Keep myself signed in to G Suite Apps (Gmail, Drive, Docs, etc.) with my work address, but sync my bookmarks, extensions and settings to my personal address.
If not, the changes they announced don't help me.
Button: http://prntscr.com/kyrhrf
Email Opened: http://prntscr.com/kyri1i
Side point - the comment "email the senior product managers in charge of Chrome!" feels aggressive. It could be an email to a generic address where they sift feedback. That's hardly an unused option on the web. Is my comment here unfair?
While 100% you are correct in the point, I feel polite discourse on HN is the aspiration.
Hopefully there was also an update to the privacy policy reflecting the new meaning of being signed into chrome?
Spent hours trying to figure out how to disable automatic updates on a Mac. Everything is so deliberately hidden it's disgusting. Find com.google.Keystone.xxx, LaunchAgents, plists, edit this XML, and edit that UpdateDefault field, policies, etc. [1]
Then, being fed up with Chrome, lets see Chromium website, maybe those guys without any bad motives can provide a developer friendly way to disable updates.. It should be somewhere in about:about right? Nop, clicking on how to turn off updates guide[2] redirects to a a Google page irrelevant to auto updates..
This reminds me of the time that Chrome didnt have any password (keychain) protection and they were claiming it was a Feature!
[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7591084?hl=en
[2] https://www.chromium.org/administrators/turning-off-auto-upd...
Emphasis mine:
> "While we think sign-in consistency will help many of our users, we’re adding a control that allows users to turn off linking web-based sign-in with browser-based sign-in—that way users have more control over their experience. For users that disable this feature, signing into a Google website will not sign them into Chrome."
Frankly, is this just more subterfuge because this is opt-out and not opt-in? Most people wouldn't really understand whatever help text you put out there. If you word it in a way that makes saying yes look like the better option, people will do so (people generally say "yes" or "ok" to any dialog because they want to get rid of them and get to work). These are dark patterns that nobody should use, least of all a company that claimed long ago "do no evil".
If signing in to Chrome is completely without any data exchange, collection, aggregation, or reporting, then please say so.
https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/
They have two main modes:
"Basic browser mode" - for not signed-in, or for signed-in but sync disabled
"Signed-in, Synced Chrome mode" - for when sync is enabled
And the basic browser mode doesn't send anything particularly interesting to Google.
Still, it would be nice to get an official statement about that.
Sounds like a sleazy corporatespeak after covering some missteps.
It seems unnecessary however to auto-log in a person to the chrome browser when there is no such login in the first place to solve this though. It would make more sense to just display a warning when the state is inconsistent rather than start auto-logging people in (regardless of sync state).
I'm still leaving, maybe even more-so because of the false heartfelt "ok let's do it your way". I will not be patronized, we're not on the same team anymore.
Anyone who accepts this as "listening the users", and addressing the issues will likely get burned again in the future.
Google is a advertising company. Their customers are not their users, and therefore I think things are unlikely to change.
Cannot be overstated. The incentive structure is clear and the subsequent evolution is happening.
Interesting concept. Care to expound? Would be interested in hearing more.
It's obvious really, and Google never denied it.
They will be deleting all cookies by default, how is that now privacy friendly?
The core feature itself, setting it off by default defeats the whole point of the feature, because it's for the 99.99% of users that are not power-users. It's also not a privacy issue because, again, sync is off by default.
This is PR. It's damage limitation.
"It is not from the benevolence (kindness) of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
Regardless of motivation (which is ultimately unknowable), is the tangible response from Google adequate?
Furthermore, this is not one mistake. This is the loudest and most obvious mistake in a trail of increasingly adversarial moves.
Maybe Google's bottom line will go up, but it won't be with me, or with anyone I know if I can help it.
There's the nub of the thing, and it's not just Google. Like the old song goes, everybody wants to rule the world. That is, if you have a popular service, you buy up other stuff, add on stuff you can do. Pretty soon your users have multiple accounts all over the place. You gotta go to some kind of single sign-on, right?
It's not that it's a bad idea, it's that it's the kind of idea that shouldn't apply to the universe. It's fine when it's your corporate site. Who wants to log into three dozen corporate systems? But when you get FB tracking you everywhere, Google integrating what you thought was a browsing app with it's universe of offerings....it doesn't work.
Yes, users probably wanted it, just like some of them want you to turn the damned thing off. But the key problem here is that single companies shouldn't be in the business of controlling all the information flow. Any architectural decision they make has social/political implications. For this chrome thing, they're trying to position google as the internet, not a place you go on the internet. Everybody wants to do that. And they all claim it's to help the users. But I don't want a company being the same thing as the internet, no matter what Aunt Sarah wants. It's not good for the rest of us. Add to that the way this was done, and then the engineering team being clueless?
It's not that they set out to do anything wrong. At some point, anything you do is wrong. You just have too much freaking power.
Google is at that point.
Trust and good will are finite resources Google. There will be no switching back. The horse has already left the barn.
Am I reading this correctly? When I sign out from one of the Gmail accounts I keep open, I will be signed out of Chrome? I hope this is a misunderstanding.
Anyway, I just spend 30 minutes searching for Firefox Add-ons replacements for my Chrome Add-ons and I am pleasantly surprised. A new era begins!
Okay sure... please provide opt-out or disable option for the "Account Chooser" you currently force on everyone for web login.
I don't want my credentials hanging around on the page after I click 'sign out'.
The function of remembering login details on web forms is better left up to my browser, where saved logins are remembered according to my settings and choice, per site. It's not Google's place to stomp all over the well-understood concept of "sign out", with this half-baked "sort of signed out" reinvention.
Privacy is Google’s Achilles heel. They have no other option than to collect and sell our data.
My guess is they know exactly which sites you visited so the fact you can't see the History sync feature means he's being disingenuous about it not being turned on.
And even if this isn't being used right now someone will eventually abuse that unwritten agreement between you and Google.
So that agreement is written down.
Huh? That's even more confusing. How can you easily tell whether you're actually signed in to Chrome?
(I use Chrome at work to test. I avoid it wherever possible because Google's interests do not align with mine.)
Hope you enjoy it!
Next up is "we recently made a change to simplify giving us all of your movements."
https://twitter.com/jonathanmayer/status/1044300922149588993
This is causing me to re-evaluate my personal technology stack.
“YOU told us you WANTED this.”
Gross.
Indeed they do. Personally I prefer this to having to pay a monthly fee, but others may disagree (and quality paid services do exist for them).
>Selling the data would mean losing their unique position.
That's right too. User data is their biggest asset versus their competitors.
>Btw, interesting article currently top voted at HN about ex-google employee ;)
Haven't caught it yet. If it's regarding their recent China play however, then that story concerns me too.
spin spin
google has lost it
>We deeply appreciate all of the passionate users who have engaged with us on this
If only we could believe this. The last few Chrome updates have clearly shown that Google will undermine the users' privacy in the blink of an eye whenever they see fit.
When there's enough backlash, they will apologize in a cringy way and make some minor changes to appease to the community.
I had my reservations against Chrome, but changed to it anyway, because Firefox was in a bad state at the time. Now that is no longer the case and Vivaldi seems to be quite good, too.
Goodbye, Chrome.
The pretext of this feature is supposedly that people who share computers are accidentally signed into someone else's account and this solves that, but why should this be done at the browser level?
I have a hard time believing that anyone who uses the family computer doesn't have their own account in the OS, where their Chrome profiles will be kept separate. I also have a hard time believing that this isn't just about making sure every session is authenticated to make cross-device tracking easier/possible. It's why every Google app on iOS seems to want you to log in. I think my suspicion is probably correct since they're making it opt-out rather than opt-in (knowing most won't).
What is that based on? I think it’s very unlikely on the contrary that the average “family computer” user (outside the tech bubble) would even know how to create a new Windows account, let alone bother to actually do it.
As Microsoft did with Windows 10 Google have done with Chrome they have moved the capture of telemetry and personal data from their network to the users platform.
In the case of Chrome the community have the choice to fork our platform and thank google for their contribution, but say no thanks to thier continued stuardship of it.
Sometimes I wonder if senior execs really understand how precarious open source based business models are - like politics we can vote and change the leaders if they stop acting for the common good.
Google employees. The community is... mostly users. Any fork of Chrome will likely fail, because there is no magical community of privacy minded developers that has the time and expertise to develop Chrome, which is a massive and highly complex piece of software.
If you really feel this way, just switch to Firefox. Mozilla actually has a team of developers who fix and improve it.
Note that a majority of Mozilla's funding comes from royalties paid by Google for ads clicked on SERPs inbound from the Google search box. So Google has the power to control Mozilla if they really needed to.
Google did the same with Gmail/youtube/etc ages ago, even creating a new profile if you did not have one for a particular service. No one bat an eye.