Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

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I would never visit a site like pornhub in a profile that I was logged in to anything other than similar sites.

note: I'm not excusing the feature but come on! Have some common sense before visiting a site like that?

The place I hate the popup the most is mobile. It comes up moments (0.5 to 2 seconds) after the site loads (say tripadvisor) which means it's possible accept it by accident as it appears under your finger. Your info is immediately shared so there is no way to recover. You're effed.

I means sure, I hate it on desktop too, but on mobile it's directly on top of the content and so more likely to be accepted by accident. IIRC you can turn this off in your Google account (or maybe only Google Workspace?)

Note that I hate it for other reasons too. There's no reason Apple/Firefox/Microsoft/Meta and any other major id providers couldn't offer this too. But if they did, then you'd see 5 of these show up [Sign in with Google], [Sign in with Apple], [Sign in with Facebook], [Sign in with Microsoft], [Sign in with Firefox]. So in other words, this seems like a tragedy of the commons in progress.

To steelman the feature though, easily sign up and easy login would be super convenient if that's what I wanted. It might be nice for a Web API that made this more privacy focused (or maybe that already exists). But yes, I'd like to see Google's specific popup disappear - be banned.

> I would never visit a site like pornhub in a profile that I was logged in to anything other than similar sites.

But that's not relevant. The popup appears whether you're logged into a google account or not. It's just an extremely annoying popup that appears all over the web.

It does not for me and I only use chrome. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Chrome has it built into the browser. If you fake the Chrome user agent string from Firefox, it'll also not show up (but you shoot yourself in the foot in other ways so I'm not advising that). Or so I heard on Mastodon a few days ago iirc

This also means that Google made it unblockable in Chrome. User scripts and extensions cannot block a browser UI feature... I guess thankfully you haven't logged in on the browser and it's clever enough not to spam it then

I would be shocked if that timing was not intentional and thoroughly tested for maximizing sign ups.

Completely agree. It’s like a game from their point of view— watching how many inadvertent logins they can capture.

> note: I'm not excusing the feature but come on! Have some common sense before visiting a site like that?

I first read this as directed at the person you're replying to (me) but then saw a second possible reading: the site should know better as to expect you are logged into google with like one click

Idk which it is so I'll answer both: people are logged into their OS these days, call it Chrome (the browser, but it's close enough to an OS nowadays) or Android but either way it's a big trackfest and nobody besides a few nerds like us here bats an eye. And I indeed don't visit those sites with cookie states of other sites ^^

I wouldn't visit it without tails at this point. But I go for the better option than tails. Just dont visit it!

> I'm not excusing the feature but come on! Have some common sense before visiting a site like that?

For sure… but there’s a self-fulfilling element there. If no one with common sense would ever use the feature… why add the feature?

As I said above, the feature is super useful to people who want to "login with Google" so plenty of people with common sense would "use the feature".

The common sense part is it's common sense, at least to the HN crowd, to not visit a site like pornhub using your main profile, or so I would have expected.

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