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Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change

blog.lukaszolejnik.com

21–30 of 507 posts

Re: Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change

#21
post #15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google seems too big to fail. what are you going to do? start searching with yahoo?

More like start searching with DuckDuckGo, use an alternate email service such as Fastmail, Protonmail, etc., and use Firefox. By the way, what's an alternate email service the HN users recommend?

I guess you missed this monster thread from earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054574

Re: Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change

#24
post #9
post #2

So, it's bad because it doesn't sync your history by default? Even if the UI is confusing, the worst case here is thinking that your data is being synced when it's not. It's like the opposite of a privacy problem.

> the worst case here is thinking that your data is being synced when it's not Confused, what do you mean? To me thinking that my data isn't being synced when it really is sounds much worse...

Yeah there's a usability issue for sure, but the article is talking about privacy and potential GDPR problems.

Edit: what I mean is, there's no way to get the interface into a state where it looks like you're not logged in, but it is syncing in the background. The only confusion here is in the other direction: you're visibly logged in, but it's not syncing.

Re: Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change

#25
post #3

I don't understand why the Chrome team is picking this hill to die on- their team (managers and developers) are all over twitter and reddit trying to explain the privacy violations away as if the people upset about this are just not understanding what's going on. I really expect this change to push a lot of people away from Chrome, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it started opening up more antitrust possibilit…

I personally know people who think they are signing into Chrome when they sign into google.com. Maybe the Chrome team is right about their larger user base?

I expect this is the case... I know I myself was thinking a few months ago why Chrome doesn't have the ability to keep the logins in sync. However, why in the world did they enable this by default for people who didn't want their browser to do anything with their Google accounts? It would make sense to keep them in sync when users request to connect their browsers to their accounts, but not when people don't want the two to be connected at all.

Re: Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change

#26
post #15
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google seems too big to fail. what are you going to do? start searching with yahoo?

More like start searching with DuckDuckGo, use an alternate email service such as Fastmail, Protonmail, etc., and use Firefox. By the way, what's an alternate email service the HN users recommend?

I went from Gmail -> ProtonMail -> Fastmail.

I left ProtonMail because it was slow and lacking features. Their reason for their snail pace of feature releases seems to be "we put security first".

Edit: Also, with ProtonMail as a paying customer, by default my signature was set to "Sent from ProtonMail". How cheesy. I'm paying for their service, they shouldn't be using me to advertise.

Re: Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change

#27
post #3

I don't understand why the Chrome team is picking this hill to die on- their team (managers and developers) are all over twitter and reddit trying to explain the privacy violations away as if the people upset about this are just not understanding what's going on. I really expect this change to push a lot of people away from Chrome, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it started opening up more antitrust possibilit…

> I don’t understand why the Chrome team is picking this hill to die on Because they’re not “dying on a hill” at all, because nobody cares. Nobody outside Hacker News and Twitter infosec people only followed by other Twitter infosec people cares about this. > I really expect this change to push a lot of people away from chrome Care to bet on that? Because I would happily take the opposite side of that bet. I think th…

> because nobody cares

A lot of people do not understand, but we do, we're the techies. It's our job to understand.

Don't mistake people not understanding for not caring.

Once people understand, they care.

Re: Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change

#28
post #3

I don't understand why the Chrome team is picking this hill to die on- their team (managers and developers) are all over twitter and reddit trying to explain the privacy violations away as if the people upset about this are just not understanding what's going on. I really expect this change to push a lot of people away from Chrome, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it started opening up more antitrust possibilit…

> I don’t understand why the Chrome team is picking this hill to die on Because they’re not “dying on a hill” at all, because nobody cares. Nobody outside Hacker News and Twitter infosec people only followed by other Twitter infosec people cares about this. > I really expect this change to push a lot of people away from chrome Care to bet on that? Because I would happily take the opposite side of that bet. I think th…

Maybe not in a few months, but things like this are funny. People who were looking for a reason to leave Chrome may use this to justify it, and while it may be a small audience, small audiences can be trendsetters, especially if they are passionate.

Much like the slide from IE and FireFox to Chrome, by the time Mozilla and Microsoft reacted, it was already too late. Time will tell if this is the start of such a momentum flip or if it's just another blip.

Re: Am I logged in or not? GDPR case study on the example of Chrome browser change

#30
post #6

I think that currently pretty much every service, device and website violates the GDPR. The GDPR requires consent or some other legitimate reason to store data about a person. I see dark patterns everywhere. I never give consent. But I get tracked to death everywhere all the time. Even before I touch anything on a website, it plants dozens of cookies on my machine. But cookies are not even the problem. Fingerprinting…

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