Is it a no-op though? From my understanding of the privacy policy, Chrome will send e.g. search queries along with other metrics to Google even when the syncing

Is it a no-op though? From my understanding of the privacy policy, Chrome will send e.g. search queries along with other metrics to Google even when the syncing is turned off. As these things are turned on by default it means they would get associated (or at least would be associable) to the logged in user. Is that not the case? Also, privacy by default means that no unnecessary data is created or shared between systems without asking the user first, regardless of what the purpose of this data sharing is. The Chrome browser and the Google web services are two different things, and most users will not expect that the two accounts are automatically tied together. The nice thing to do here would be to simply ask the user before syncing the logins. I suspect that the long-term goal here is to tie the browser history and search queries of more users to their Google accounts, because that information is very valuable (but also highly sensitive).