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Keep in mind that while everybody here is all outraged about this, nobody else is. Because the experience is so nice. It's the reason why I can search for "pr

Keep in mind that while everybody here is all outraged about this, nobody else is. Because the experience is so nice. It's the reason why I can search for "prefecture Melun" on my laptop, then jump in the car, open up maps on my phone, Start typing "1" and watch it suggest "12 rue de Gambas, Melun 77320", which happens to be the address of the Melun prefecture. That sort of thing happens for me every day, and i think it's kinda cool. Google knows this stuff about my life and will suggest it at useful times. If I open maps on the day I have a flight, ferry, or hotel reservation, it'll just assume I want to navigate there (because it read one of my emails) and suggest it for me. So yeah, I guess I should be outraged and worry that they'll start targeting me for ads or ratting me out to the NSA or something. But thus far they haven't. It's just that they can offer all this cool stuff if they connect your devices. And in 2018 that involves using a database. Personally, that does not concern me all that much.

sajithdilshan 8y ago
100% agree with you. This is one of the main reasons why I switched to Chrome. I can understand that some people value their privacy, but for those cases why don't just use a browser like Firefox.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure most people switched to Chrome because it was a better browser, not because they wanted Google to have more information about their browsing habits. Note that all the examples you're agreeing with are about logged-in experiences with Google products and have nothing to do with being signed in to Chrome.
hackujin 8y ago
Nobody is outraged? You obviously weren't around last night when my girlfriend found out that Google photos was automatically uploading all our nudes off her phone without her knowing about it. Pissed off would be a massive understatement for how she really felt about it. I've already been immediately disabling Google Photos on my own phone because of this for years. I've already been using Chromium instead of Chrome for both my Windows and OS X computers. Now I will be making a real effort to switch to Firefox. It's over. Chrome is the new IE6. Go fuck yourselves Google. You are trash to me now.
g8oz 8y ago
You get that cool stuff because you are signed into your Google Account on your laptop and on your phone. The controversy is over the new behavior of being signed into your Chrome browser by default. Do you really want by default to have your browsing history sent to Google?
justtopostthis3 8y ago
I use and appreciate those conveniences too, without having ever signed in to Chrome or using Chrome Sync. Many privacy-conscious people make all the same tradeoffs that everyone else does; like you, they've decided that what they're giving up is worth what they're getting in return. The problem with this change is that for many people there is no benefit and they were not asked, so they feel they are having something forcefully taken away from them without getting anything in return.
reacharavindh 8y ago
The day is not that far, when you look to buy say car insurance, and you get $XYZ as a quote. Your ur friend gets $ABC where $ABC <<< $XYZ. Why? because the profile that all these corporation built on you seems to suggest you have the character profile of a 19 year old. Is there a way you could prevent this? Yes, if you care about privacy and not let someone build that database in the first place. It's not only/always the NSA that we need to worry about.. You can already see this in some sense. A flight ticket could cost more if you look for it using a Mac instead of a PC. The road to creepy data mess is not that far.
- savanaly 8y ago
  Information about what you're willing to pay isn't sufficient to lead to you paying a higher price, like in your example. There has to be no competition in the given market (probably not the case in your particular example-- car insurance).
  - hobofan 8y ago
    What competition? Oh, you mean those companies on the second page of the search results?
    - savanaly 8y ago
      Lack of ability for companies to advertise to you seems like a distinct concern from that of how much information they have about you, let's take it one at a time!
      - hobofan 8y ago
        > Lack of ability for companies to advertise to you seems like a distinct concern It's not about "lack of ability to advertise", it's about someone being able to heavily manipulate the perceived availability of competition (which is much more important than the real availability of competition). And that someone is the same someone that helps the companies manipulate the price (hint: it's Google).
partiallypro 8y ago
The thing is that you opted into the services you gave examples of, you aren't opting into the Chrome sign-in, it's forced upon you. No one had a problem with Facebook collecting tons of meta data, until one day, it mattered. One more link in the chain that ties users down, everyone is complacent while slowly becoming a product.
- lallysingh 8y ago
  Well, kinda. Now the choice is made at what browser you use.
  - partiallypro 8y ago
    How long before Google forces you to have a Google Account to even search? I think we all know it's probably going that direction eventually.
    - lallysingh 8y ago
      I think that's backwards. Google without Search has very little to most of the Internet, and Google knows it. Search is the basis of Google's Ad money, and they won't do anything to restrict that. Other search engines are good enough to work if a user's unhappy, and Google hopes that users never have a reason to notice that.
      - partiallypro 8y ago
        If Google can do what Amazon is doing with product searches in a "one click" purchase model the trade will pay off in forcing people to sign in. A huge huge portion of Google income is from direct purchases, which is why Amazon is arguably its biggest competitor, not Bing. At the very least searches are much less relevant if you aren't signed in, and that gap is only going to continue to grow imo.
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
downplay and dismiss, SOP
hobofan 8y ago
> or ratting me out to the NSA or something. But thus far they haven't. I think in a post-Snowden world that is a pretty bold assumption.
daveFNbuck 8y ago
Can you give one example of a convenience you got from being signed in to the Chrome browser? All of your examples would work without that.
- nolok 8y ago
  Having the same settings/history/bookmarks/extensions shared between my main laptop, my cheapo 10" notebook I use when in on the beach or in a plane etc ..., and my phone. Being able, in three clicks, to re-open on my computer a tab I closed on my phone a couple hours ago. For me that's it.
  - JoshMnem 8y ago
    All of that works without forced log-in.
    - nolok 8y ago
      forced log-in is not the question/scenario I was answering to, parent asked "a convenience you got from being signed in to the Chrome browser". So I'm not sure why you answer that to my message.
  - daveFNbuck 8y ago
    That doesn't benefit from the Google account synergy like the other examples. You get that if you log in to Firefox.
    - nolok 8y ago
      Uhhh, yeah, but the question wasn't "what is something Chrome offers you that you can't replace", it's "what do you get by getting logged in that you enjoy". I'm sure competitors offer the same sort of thing.
JoshMnem 8y ago
Every feature you've listed works without forced log-in. Taking away the choice to share everything about one's life with an ad company is what people are angry about.
- sneak 8y ago
  There is no forced login. You can still use Chrome without logging in to anything. You can also disable Chrome Sync even if Chrome is logged in after logging in to gmail, so “forced” is the wrong term.
  - JoshMnem 8y ago
    You can't use Google Chrome without logging into the browser itself if you use any Google service.
    - sneak 8y ago
      False. Incognito windows. You can also disable the login state sync as many have pointed out.
      - JoshMnem 8y ago
        By disable do you mean use the temporary flag that is already removed in Chrome Canary? Incognito windows are not a realistic alternative, because that adds more limitations.
sdinsn 8y ago
The point is that it is forced and you have to opt out, rather than opt in.
flossyspeaker 8y ago
This is an old as time debate of "Security vs Convenience". It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https? Same thing with letting Google start to categorize and selling your profile to organizations. It might be nice now, but in 5-10 years what will the landscape look like? It's ultimately your choice to determine how much of your information you are willing to give up for the sake of convenience but you should think a little more about what the future could look like and start putting in some safeguards to protect yourself in the future.
- sneak 8y ago
  Giving up privacy for most people is not a security reduction. Privacy is extremely important, but it is relevant only to a tiny minority of people who care about it or otherwise require it. Most people neither care nor use their rights to privacy, so in practice, losing it, for them, is no real loss. It is an increase in convenience—at no cost. The cost is a societal one, borne only when “no privacy” becomes a widespread default. As it stands, there are other browsers that offer better privacy for those who care about such things.
  - 0x54D5 8y ago
    Let's say I don't care about privacy at all. Let's say I wanted to just logout of one Google account so that I can login to another one. They disabled the logout button today on mobile. It's now using your Android preferences. Meanwhile on PC it logically would probably log you out of sync as well. Then I login to my burner google account and oh look all my bookmarks and sync settings just copied from one account to the other. This seems broken to me in many ways. It only works well if you only have one account.
  - sanbor 8y ago
    The NSA revelations shown that governments are doing mass surveillance for real and it is not just a nonsense conspiracy. Right now maybe only ver few might get affected by this. But if in the future the people in power use that information against you or your people you will regret it to exchange your privacy for convenience.
sneak 8y ago
Also, even those of us who care about privacy are not all outraged about this. I have been using Chrome Sync (with a clientside encryption passphrase) for years. It always surprised me that there were separate login states for gmail and the browser. This change saves me a step, and reduces user confusion too.
- jonbronson 8y ago
  Users who already sign into Chrome are not affected by this issue. But for people who do not already sign in, we have now been force-logged in without consent. That is the problem everyone is outraged about.
  - sneak 8y ago
    But that logged in to Chrome does nothing unless you additionally consent to Sync, so why do you care?
- beenBoutIT 8y ago
  Exactly. This just streamlines the login process and cuts the number of times users enter their password in half.
saghm 8y ago
From what I've read, the main objection to this isn't the linking of the accounts for people who want it, it's that there's no way to opt out for people who want to use Google services on the web but don't want to log into the browser itself at all. I don't think there's any reason that they couldn't make it so that logging into Chrome automatically logs you into your Google account on the web as well without doing the reverse as well. To me, this feels like an even worse version of the "opt-in by default" issue; to opt out, you also have to opt out of logging into any Google accounts at all while in Chrome, which is a huge ask even for privacy-minded people who don't want to log into the browser itself.
jonbronson 8y ago
"Because the experience is so nice." If the experience is "so nice" why are so many people outraged? The data suggests this is a terrible experience to look up and suddenly see you've been auto-logged into a browser without your consent. Terrible UX.
- TheDong 8y ago
  > why are so many people outraged? Whenever you think that many people are outraged and someone else claims that it's not the case, the logical conclusion is that you or both of you are in bubbles. Is it possible that you, a hacker news poster, are in a bubble whereby you've heard the opinion of tech-savy people, but not the opinion of the average mom who doesn't even realize the auto-login is the reason her android phone is now suggesting browser history from her desktop?
  - jonbronson 8y ago
    I agree it's worth acknowledging that it is the tech crowd that is concerned, and that's exactly what we should expect. This was a stealth-release feature that doesn't really explain itself and has no clear way to disable. It seems completely reasonable that it is tech experts who are the ones to first notice this problem, and rightly criticize it.
    - orbitingpluto 8y ago
      I agree that it is worth acknowledging that it the tech crowd as well. But then, who should you be listening to about whether to vaccinate your kid? Jenny McCarthy on social media or a bunch of people who each had to spend several years of effort to be called a doctor? Obviously, go with the better user experience.
ac4tw 8y ago
I think this is my favorite quote for discussions that start out like yours: “Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. – Edward Snowden” Maybe I'm foolish, but I have this hope that a shift from the "make money off of mining your data" business model to something else, perhaps like crypto/tokens enable, might just enable the convenience you speak of, without forcing me to sell my information because everyone else didn't care to value their data.

sajithdilshan 8y ago

100% agree with you. This is one of the main reasons why I switched to Chrome. I can understand that some people value their privacy, but for those cases why don't just use a browser like Firefox.

daveFNbuck 8y ago
I'm pretty sure most people switched to Chrome because it was a better browser, not because they wanted Google to have more information about their browsing habits. Note that all the examples you're agreeing with are about logged-in experiences with Google products and have nothing to do with being signed in to Chrome.

hackujin 8y ago

Nobody is outraged? You obviously weren't around last night when my girlfriend found out that Google photos was automatically uploading all our nudes off her phone without her knowing about it. Pissed off would be a massive understatement for how she really felt about it. I've already been immediately disabling Google Photos on my own phone because of this for years. I've already been using Chromium instead of Chrome for both my Windows and OS X computers. Now I will be making a real effort to switch to Firefox. It's over. Chrome is the new IE6. Go fuck yourselves Google. You are trash to me now.

g8oz 8y ago

You get that cool stuff because you are signed into your Google Account on your laptop and on your phone. The controversy is over the new behavior of being signed into your Chrome browser by default. Do you really want by default to have your browsing history sent to Google?

justtopostthis3 8y ago

I use and appreciate those conveniences too, without having ever signed in to Chrome or using Chrome Sync. Many privacy-conscious people make all the same tradeoffs that everyone else does; like you, they've decided that what they're giving up is worth what they're getting in return. The problem with this change is that for many people there is no benefit and they were not asked, so they feel they are having something forcefully taken away from them without getting anything in return.

reacharavindh 8y ago

The day is not that far, when you look to buy say car insurance, and you get $XYZ as a quote. Your ur friend gets $ABC where $ABC <<< $XYZ. Why? because the profile that all these corporation built on you seems to suggest you have the character profile of a 19 year old. Is there a way you could prevent this? Yes, if you care about privacy and not let someone build that database in the first place. It's not only/always the NSA that we need to worry about.. You can already see this in some sense. A flight ticket could cost more if you look for it using a Mac instead of a PC. The road to creepy data mess is not that far.

savanaly 8y ago
Information about what you're willing to pay isn't sufficient to lead to you paying a higher price, like in your example. There has to be no competition in the given market (probably not the case in your particular example-- car insurance).
- hobofan 8y ago
  What competition? Oh, you mean those companies on the second page of the search results?
  - savanaly 8y ago
    Lack of ability for companies to advertise to you seems like a distinct concern from that of how much information they have about you, let's take it one at a time!
    - hobofan 8y ago
      > Lack of ability for companies to advertise to you seems like a distinct concern It's not about "lack of ability to advertise", it's about someone being able to heavily manipulate the perceived availability of competition (which is much more important than the real availability of competition). And that someone is the same someone that helps the companies manipulate the price (hint: it's Google).

partiallypro 8y ago

The thing is that you opted into the services you gave examples of, you aren't opting into the Chrome sign-in, it's forced upon you. No one had a problem with Facebook collecting tons of meta data, until one day, it mattered. One more link in the chain that ties users down, everyone is complacent while slowly becoming a product.

lallysingh 8y ago
Well, kinda. Now the choice is made at what browser you use.
- partiallypro 8y ago
  How long before Google forces you to have a Google Account to even search? I think we all know it's probably going that direction eventually.
  - lallysingh 8y ago
    I think that's backwards. Google without Search has very little to most of the Internet, and Google knows it. Search is the basis of Google's Ad money, and they won't do anything to restrict that. Other search engines are good enough to work if a user's unhappy, and Google hopes that users never have a reason to notice that.
    - partiallypro 8y ago
      If Google can do what Amazon is doing with product searches in a "one click" purchase model the trade will pay off in forcing people to sign in. A huge huge portion of Google income is from direct purchases, which is why Amazon is arguably its biggest competitor, not Bing. At the very least searches are much less relevant if you aren't signed in, and that gap is only going to continue to grow imo.

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

downplay and dismiss, SOP

hobofan 8y ago

> or ratting me out to the NSA or something. But thus far they haven't. I think in a post-Snowden world that is a pretty bold assumption.

daveFNbuck 8y ago

Can you give one example of a convenience you got from being signed in to the Chrome browser? All of your examples would work without that.

nolok 8y ago
Having the same settings/history/bookmarks/extensions shared between my main laptop, my cheapo 10" notebook I use when in on the beach or in a plane etc ..., and my phone. Being able, in three clicks, to re-open on my computer a tab I closed on my phone a couple hours ago. For me that's it.
- JoshMnem 8y ago
  All of that works without forced log-in.
  - nolok 8y ago
    forced log-in is not the question/scenario I was answering to, parent asked "a convenience you got from being signed in to the Chrome browser". So I'm not sure why you answer that to my message.
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  That doesn't benefit from the Google account synergy like the other examples. You get that if you log in to Firefox.
  - nolok 8y ago
    Uhhh, yeah, but the question wasn't "what is something Chrome offers you that you can't replace", it's "what do you get by getting logged in that you enjoy". I'm sure competitors offer the same sort of thing.

JoshMnem 8y ago

Every feature you've listed works without forced log-in. Taking away the choice to share everything about one's life with an ad company is what people are angry about.

sneak 8y ago
There is no forced login. You can still use Chrome without logging in to anything. You can also disable Chrome Sync even if Chrome is logged in after logging in to gmail, so “forced” is the wrong term.
- JoshMnem 8y ago
  You can't use Google Chrome without logging into the browser itself if you use any Google service.
  - sneak 8y ago
    False. Incognito windows. You can also disable the login state sync as many have pointed out.
    - JoshMnem 8y ago
      By disable do you mean use the temporary flag that is already removed in Chrome Canary? Incognito windows are not a realistic alternative, because that adds more limitations.

sdinsn 8y ago

The point is that it is forced and you have to opt out, rather than opt in.

flossyspeaker 8y ago

This is an old as time debate of "Security vs Convenience". It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https? Same thing with letting Google start to categorize and selling your profile to organizations. It might be nice now, but in 5-10 years what will the landscape look like? It's ultimately your choice to determine how much of your information you are willing to give up for the sake of convenience but you should think a little more about what the future could look like and start putting in some safeguards to protect yourself in the future.

sneak 8y ago
Giving up privacy for most people is not a security reduction. Privacy is extremely important, but it is relevant only to a tiny minority of people who care about it or otherwise require it. Most people neither care nor use their rights to privacy, so in practice, losing it, for them, is no real loss. It is an increase in convenience—at no cost. The cost is a societal one, borne only when “no privacy” becomes a widespread default. As it stands, there are other browsers that offer better privacy for those who care about such things.
- 0x54D5 8y ago
  Let's say I don't care about privacy at all. Let's say I wanted to just logout of one Google account so that I can login to another one. They disabled the logout button today on mobile. It's now using your Android preferences. Meanwhile on PC it logically would probably log you out of sync as well. Then I login to my burner google account and oh look all my bookmarks and sync settings just copied from one account to the other. This seems broken to me in many ways. It only works well if you only have one account.
- sanbor 8y ago
  The NSA revelations shown that governments are doing mass surveillance for real and it is not just a nonsense conspiracy. Right now maybe only ver few might get affected by this. But if in the future the people in power use that information against you or your people you will regret it to exchange your privacy for convenience.

sneak 8y ago

Also, even those of us who care about privacy are not all outraged about this. I have been using Chrome Sync (with a clientside encryption passphrase) for years. It always surprised me that there were separate login states for gmail and the browser. This change saves me a step, and reduces user confusion too.

jonbronson 8y ago
Users who already sign into Chrome are not affected by this issue. But for people who do not already sign in, we have now been force-logged in without consent. That is the problem everyone is outraged about.
- sneak 8y ago
  But that logged in to Chrome does nothing unless you additionally consent to Sync, so why do you care?
beenBoutIT 8y ago
Exactly. This just streamlines the login process and cuts the number of times users enter their password in half.

saghm 8y ago

From what I've read, the main objection to this isn't the linking of the accounts for people who want it, it's that there's no way to opt out for people who want to use Google services on the web but don't want to log into the browser itself at all. I don't think there's any reason that they couldn't make it so that logging into Chrome automatically logs you into your Google account on the web as well without doing the reverse as well. To me, this feels like an even worse version of the "opt-in by default" issue; to opt out, you also have to opt out of logging into any Google accounts at all while in Chrome, which is a huge ask even for privacy-minded people who don't want to log into the browser itself.

jonbronson 8y ago

"Because the experience is so nice." If the experience is "so nice" why are so many people outraged? The data suggests this is a terrible experience to look up and suddenly see you've been auto-logged into a browser without your consent. Terrible UX.

TheDong 8y ago
> why are so many people outraged? Whenever you think that many people are outraged and someone else claims that it's not the case, the logical conclusion is that you or both of you are in bubbles. Is it possible that you, a hacker news poster, are in a bubble whereby you've heard the opinion of tech-savy people, but not the opinion of the average mom who doesn't even realize the auto-login is the reason her android phone is now suggesting browser history from her desktop?
- jonbronson 8y ago
  I agree it's worth acknowledging that it is the tech crowd that is concerned, and that's exactly what we should expect. This was a stealth-release feature that doesn't really explain itself and has no clear way to disable. It seems completely reasonable that it is tech experts who are the ones to first notice this problem, and rightly criticize it.
  - orbitingpluto 8y ago
    I agree that it is worth acknowledging that it the tech crowd as well. But then, who should you be listening to about whether to vaccinate your kid? Jenny McCarthy on social media or a bunch of people who each had to spend several years of effort to be called a doctor? Obviously, go with the better user experience.

ac4tw 8y ago

I think this is my favorite quote for discussions that start out like yours: “Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. – Edward Snowden” Maybe I'm foolish, but I have this hope that a shift from the "make money off of mining your data" business model to something else, perhaps like crypto/tokens enable, might just enable the convenience you speak of, without forcing me to sell my information because everyone else didn't care to value their data.