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".
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.
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."
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?
They've achieved so much ubiquity, that their offerings are becoming incompatible with an open web.
{ "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...
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.
Given that, their reaction on their blog seems above and beyond to me.
Edit: Downvoters, reply with how this is incorrect instead of downvoting.