This is actually a good thing. People shouldn't be syncing ANYTHING with google :)
Here's a fork of chromium with the other google bits removed. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Well depends on your definition of open source. Most of the code for the sync, as well as these other internal APIs, is on Google's backend and is very much closed source. The thin client code calling these APIs may have been in Chromium, but as a general rule of thumb, I wouldn't really call Google Translate and Sync open source.
Google provides the code for Chromium, but I'm not sure why there's an expectation that they should also freely provide internal APIs which require backend servers. What other open source software provides such guarantees?
> I wonder if they could in theory just grab the key from chrome
I saw some discussion of that in the discussion group. I believe it would break their terms and services for distros to do it, not sure if an individual could on their own though.
Is it? Is chromium use more than a rounding error?
I dubbed this "convenience herding". nobody is forcing you to do anything; they are just making some things very very inconvenient relative to how easy it's to just put it all in their servers or use their software (the cloud is an euphemism for not your computer)
If they actually revert chromium to not having any of this, they have the problem that they are building a path that works for a lot of people and takes us further away from chrome. It will be politically bad if they dead end that path, but a politically bad end is not unlikely.