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.
- 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.
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.
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.