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Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know why but I get an intense feeling of disgust at “people at higher position” making stupid decisions like this one.

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.

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In my experience at Google, "people at higher positions" do not really make these kinds of decisions. Someone at the leafmost position in the organization comes up with some research and recommendations and if nobody stops them, they go ahead and do it. It's actually really disorganized.

I feel like integrating auto sign in, tracking and Google cookies is less of a disorganized decision and more of a premeditated, carefully snuck in effort for their ads business. All the stars align for the bottom line.

Just look at the state of Android. Try being a cell phone OEM who wants to use Android but without Google integration. Impossible.

> 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.

Yet most of them have to install play store. There is no going away from Google completely unless you're Amazon on large budget and you make a big branch off Android source.

Not in China.

> most of them have to install play store

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.

OK, try being and OEM who wants to use Android but without Google integration in a country where Google is legal. I think Amazon backs up that point, not yours.

Google is legal in Russia, and there is a rumour Yandex is going to launch Android smartphone in a month or so. And the store.yandex.com is up.

Now that you've extended it beyond phones, tell that to Comcast, Samsung, Nikon, etc.

Honestly, I'm going to have to disagree with the first statement. Like any large project, it was planned, but all for separate reasons.

- 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.

Fortunately, the EU is starting to do something about that: https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-e...

C'mon, that's a bit of a cartoon characterization. Privacy related stuff must go through legal first when a change is more than just testing a shade of blue. It's not the Wild West in there.

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