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The sync thing was overblown. The cookies thing was a bit more concerning to me. Not so much from a privacy angle but from more of a 'Chrome has lots its way'

The sync thing was overblown. The cookies thing was a bit more concerning to me. Not so much from a privacy angle but from more of a 'Chrome has lots its way' angle. A lot of our software's more complex interfaces are Chrome-first since its faster to develop - yesterday was the first time I made a serious consideration to change that approach. Glad to see they are listening to user feedback and reacting quickly.

kodablah 8y ago
> Glad to see they are listening to user feedback and reacting quickly. I consider an opt-out as paying lip service to the feedback. Clearly they feel the default is more important than the generated angst. Reaction clearly needs to be even stronger to affect real change. An opt-in (e.g. a dialog on next Google login from Chrome asking for feature enable) is a compromise, an opt-out is to appease the temporarily upset while keeping all that they added in place and defaulted. This is not an olive branch, don't accept it, condemn the continued incremental marriage of Google browser+services, and continue to move on and de-google yourself where you reasonably can.
- derefr 8y ago
  You seem to be looking at the choice of opt-in vs. opt-out from the perspective of a user who actually cares about the feature. Much more common, though, I'd say, is the type of user who will accept whatever the default is, because they just don't care. Compare: the organ-donor registry. When it's opt-in, most people don't opt in. When it's opt-out, most people don't opt out. Most people just don't care. If you think something is good for people, you have to consider the large group of users who don't want to put in the time/energy to evaluate whether the thing is good for them, but just want the program to shut up and do what it does by default—whatever that is.
  - babuskov 8y ago
    > Compare: the organ-donor registry. When it's opt-in, most people don't opt in. When it's opt-out, most people don't opt out. Most people just don't care. Most people don't know it exists or that they have an option. You cannot care about something if you don't know it's there.
    - jee1shi 8y ago
      > Most people don't know it exists or that they have an option. You cannot care about something if you don't know it's there. Most people won't know that these chrome features exist. Most people don't go digging through options and settings, they just download chrome and go, go, go.
      - babuskov 8y ago
        Exactly. Same as the organ donor thing. They don't KNOW. If they knew they would CARE.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    It’s not just that the user doesn’t care. I don’t want to have to monitor constantly hackernews to find out what new invasion of privacy google will sneak in discretely, even if there is a switch somewhere to opt out. I want to be able to rely on the tools I use.
    - joshuamorton 8y ago
      The issue with this line of thinking is that this change isn't really a privacy invasion. Account consistency didn't at all affect privacy. You still had to opt in to syncing, which did affect privacy.
      - cm2187 8y ago
        I would be surprised if it didn't affect google's capacity to track you nominally. When I flush all cookies from my browser session, and open a new session, I am a new user to google's various tracking mechanism. If I am an authenticated google user, then I am not.
        joshuamorton 8y ago
        I would agree that there was at least potentially an issue due to it re-logging you in. But I'll note that no one wrote a blog post about that. Someone just mentioned that on twitter after this was already a big "controversy". In other words, you had half of HN claiming to be leaving Chrome over something they had no reason to believe had any privacy implications, and in reality, has either 0, or really close to 0, actual privacy implications. I made a claim about HN being a small group in the grand scheme, and someone countered by claiming that most users didn't understand what was changing. But I think the funny thing is that the average user, who had the understanding that "literally nothing" was changing, would have been closer to the truth of the situation than the average HN commenter. Not to say that the result of the hullabaloo was bad, I actually think this set of updates only improves things over where they are now, but its still a really strange sequence of events.
        8y ago
  - grey-area 8y ago
    If you think something is good for people Therein lies the disagreement - Google thinks it is good for people to log in to Google services via their browser, and to always be logged in (it's certainly good for Google!), therefore they choose these defaults, opting in to login and to tracking. Many disagree.
    - cm2187 8y ago
      Like Apple thinks it's "good for people" to have a 40% markup on their product...
      - dredmorbius 8y ago
        If you want to participate in a debate or discussion, then ddo so. Whataboutism, deflection, projection, etc., are not that.
pilif 8y ago
The cookies thing could be seen as a bug: the button does remove the cookies, but because your google sign in state is now tied to the browser sign in state, new cookies will immediately be set. To fix this, the “remove cookies” button would also have to sign you out of chrome which would also feel weird from a UX perspective. All in all I think this was just released a bit early before all UX edge cases could be tackled (or even discovered. Sometimes you find things only in wider rollouts)
- cpeterso 8y ago
  If exempting Google's cookies from being cleared was a bug, they would not have added a message in the UI that "you won't be signed out of your Google Account": https://twitter.com/ctavan/status/1044282084020441088 https://twitter.com/ctavan/status/1044282084020441088
- feanaro 8y ago
  > The cookies thing could be seen as a bug: the button does remove the cookies, but because your google sign in state is now tied to the browser sign in state, new cookies will immediately be set. Then maybe tying the Google state to the browser state was a mistake and should be reverted?
theon144 8y ago
>A lot of our software's more complex interfaces are Chrome-first since its faster to develop - yesterday was the first time I made a serious consideration to change that approach. Heh, I wonder if the next privacy blunder from Google will make you further reconsider your "voluntary vendor lock-in" approach :)
- statictype 8y ago
  I said Chrome-first. Not Chrome-only.
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    I'd still ask to consider a Firefox first policy. I've been using Firefox as my main dev browser for years and it has a huge, practical advantage: - Usually it Just Works in every mainstream browser (had one single case in the last year where it broke in another browser). My colleagues who use Chrome has to fix QA bugs more often than me it seems ;-) Bonus: Support a good cause (cross browser compability)
  - wiz21c 8y ago
    yeah like in "this is just temporary code we put in production, we'll clean it later" :-) :-) </joking-with-a-touch-of-cynism>
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
feanaro 8y ago
I disagree the sync thing was overblown. A website's cookies and the internal functionality of the browser are conceptually very different and (up to now) well differentiated concepts. Mixing them up and blurring the lines between them is just a portal to confusion of the average user, who is already confused enough. I fear that changes like this will eventually make it impossible to effectively explain to an average user even the basics of how the web works.
- Gaelan 8y ago
  Google's claim (which I'm inclined to believe) is that the previous state is more confusing to the average user. While we think in terms of "content" vs "browser", apparently the average user does not, and finds it confusing that part of the browser is signed into Google, but part isn't.
  - feanaro 8y ago
    That may be, but that doesn't mean the concept should be abandoned and the browser married to the content in inexplicable ways. At least the way things are now, I am able to understand what is going on and teach it to my parents. If the non-average users also stop understanding what is happening behind the covers, is there any hope left for the open web?

kodablah 8y ago

> Glad to see they are listening to user feedback and reacting quickly. I consider an opt-out as paying lip service to the feedback. Clearly they feel the default is more important than the generated angst. Reaction clearly needs to be even stronger to affect real change. An opt-in (e.g. a dialog on next Google login from Chrome asking for feature enable) is a compromise, an opt-out is to appease the temporarily upset while keeping all that they added in place and defaulted. This is not an olive branch, don't accept it, condemn the continued incremental marriage of Google browser+services, and continue to move on and de-google yourself where you reasonably can.

derefr 8y ago
You seem to be looking at the choice of opt-in vs. opt-out from the perspective of a user who actually cares about the feature. Much more common, though, I'd say, is the type of user who will accept whatever the default is, because they just don't care. Compare: the organ-donor registry. When it's opt-in, most people don't opt in. When it's opt-out, most people don't opt out. Most people just don't care. If you think something is good for people, you have to consider the large group of users who don't want to put in the time/energy to evaluate whether the thing is good for them, but just want the program to shut up and do what it does by default—whatever that is.
- babuskov 8y ago
  > Compare: the organ-donor registry. When it's opt-in, most people don't opt in. When it's opt-out, most people don't opt out. Most people just don't care. Most people don't know it exists or that they have an option. You cannot care about something if you don't know it's there.
  - jee1shi 8y ago
    > Most people don't know it exists or that they have an option. You cannot care about something if you don't know it's there. Most people won't know that these chrome features exist. Most people don't go digging through options and settings, they just download chrome and go, go, go.
    - babuskov 8y ago
      Exactly. Same as the organ donor thing. They don't KNOW. If they knew they would CARE.
- cm2187 8y ago
  It’s not just that the user doesn’t care. I don’t want to have to monitor constantly hackernews to find out what new invasion of privacy google will sneak in discretely, even if there is a switch somewhere to opt out. I want to be able to rely on the tools I use.
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    The issue with this line of thinking is that this change isn't really a privacy invasion. Account consistency didn't at all affect privacy. You still had to opt in to syncing, which did affect privacy.
    - cm2187 8y ago
      I would be surprised if it didn't affect google's capacity to track you nominally. When I flush all cookies from my browser session, and open a new session, I am a new user to google's various tracking mechanism. If I am an authenticated google user, then I am not.
      - joshuamorton 8y ago
        I would agree that there was at least potentially an issue due to it re-logging you in. But I'll note that no one wrote a blog post about that. Someone just mentioned that on twitter after this was already a big "controversy". In other words, you had half of HN claiming to be leaving Chrome over something they had no reason to believe had any privacy implications, and in reality, has either 0, or really close to 0, actual privacy implications. I made a claim about HN being a small group in the grand scheme, and someone countered by claiming that most users didn't understand what was changing. But I think the funny thing is that the average user, who had the understanding that "literally nothing" was changing, would have been closer to the truth of the situation than the average HN commenter. Not to say that the result of the hullabaloo was bad, I actually think this set of updates only improves things over where they are now, but its still a really strange sequence of events.
        8y ago
- grey-area 8y ago
  If you think something is good for people Therein lies the disagreement - Google thinks it is good for people to log in to Google services via their browser, and to always be logged in (it's certainly good for Google!), therefore they choose these defaults, opting in to login and to tracking. Many disagree.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    Like Apple thinks it's "good for people" to have a 40% markup on their product...
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      If you want to participate in a debate or discussion, then ddo so. Whataboutism, deflection, projection, etc., are not that.

pilif 8y ago

The cookies thing could be seen as a bug: the button does remove the cookies, but because your google sign in state is now tied to the browser sign in state, new cookies will immediately be set. To fix this, the “remove cookies” button would also have to sign you out of chrome which would also feel weird from a UX perspective. All in all I think this was just released a bit early before all UX edge cases could be tackled (or even discovered. Sometimes you find things only in wider rollouts)

cpeterso 8y ago
If exempting Google's cookies from being cleared was a bug, they would not have added a message in the UI that "you won't be signed out of your Google Account": https://twitter.com/ctavan/status/1044282084020441088 https://twitter.com/ctavan/status/1044282084020441088
feanaro 8y ago
> The cookies thing could be seen as a bug: the button does remove the cookies, but because your google sign in state is now tied to the browser sign in state, new cookies will immediately be set. Then maybe tying the Google state to the browser state was a mistake and should be reverted?

theon144 8y ago

>A lot of our software's more complex interfaces are Chrome-first since its faster to develop - yesterday was the first time I made a serious consideration to change that approach. Heh, I wonder if the next privacy blunder from Google will make you further reconsider your "voluntary vendor lock-in" approach :)

statictype 8y ago
I said Chrome-first. Not Chrome-only.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  I'd still ask to consider a Firefox first policy. I've been using Firefox as my main dev browser for years and it has a huge, practical advantage: - Usually it Just Works in every mainstream browser (had one single case in the last year where it broke in another browser). My colleagues who use Chrome has to fix QA bugs more often than me it seems ;-) Bonus: Support a good cause (cross browser compability)
- wiz21c 8y ago
  yeah like in "this is just temporary code we put in production, we'll clean it later" :-) :-) </joking-with-a-touch-of-cynism>

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

feanaro 8y ago

I disagree the sync thing was overblown. A website's cookies and the internal functionality of the browser are conceptually very different and (up to now) well differentiated concepts. Mixing them up and blurring the lines between them is just a portal to confusion of the average user, who is already confused enough. I fear that changes like this will eventually make it impossible to effectively explain to an average user even the basics of how the web works.

Gaelan 8y ago
Google's claim (which I'm inclined to believe) is that the previous state is more confusing to the average user. While we think in terms of "content" vs "browser", apparently the average user does not, and finds it confusing that part of the browser is signed into Google, but part isn't.
- feanaro 8y ago
  That may be, but that doesn't mean the concept should be abandoned and the browser married to the content in inexplicable ways. At least the way things are now, I am able to understand what is going on and teach it to my parents. If the non-average users also stop understanding what is happening behind the covers, is there any hope left for the open web?