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

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

#201

Post by hrktb »

manigandham wrote: post #154
mulmen wrote: post #132

Chrome has been the new IE for years. "just use chrome" is an endless refrain from webdevs who don't want to test on Firefox. Not sure why it is so hard for people to see what is going on here. Google has a massive conflict of interest with their web development efforts. This is classic Microsoft-esque Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

That's a bad example. In technical progress, Chrome is the complete opposite of IE (which seems to be replaced by Safari these days) and way better than the rest in pushing forward new features. Also 99% of the time Firefox and Edge work just fine. EDIT: Yes, IE was great in the beginning, but then it stagnated and earned the wide reputation of being terrible obsolete anchor that it is now known for. It's with this l…

IE at its core was technically very advanced, way faster than Netscape, and pushed a ton of new features.

Dynamic HTML as it was called, CSS, encryption, and so much more stuff came to IE before any of the competitors.

Then it became the IE6 we all came to know. The analogy with Chrome starting as a trail blazer and progressively taking the same trajectory is perfect, really.

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

#202

Post by simion314 »

joshuamorton wrote: post #156
pg_bot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shock and Denial is the first stage in the 7 stages of grief. The chrome team is clearly in the wrong here, and it will take some time for them to realize that they screwed up and that they need to fix it.

I also work at Google though have nothing to do with Chrome. This isn't "clear" to me. There are certainly complaints about this change within HN, but there are also people here saying that they appreciate the change, or that they're ambivalent. But the more important part of things is that HN has what, maybe 10000 active users? Chrome has over a billion. Even if every HN commenter was vehemently against this change,…

You could have just ask for permissions for this new feature,what next switch the default browser or scan my files because it is better in some metric for some majority of users?

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

#203

Post by thecodingmonk »

I see many people here complaining about this feature, and while I completely agree with them I also find it difficult to imagine an effective way to clearly explain these concerns to a random average user with limited to no knowledge of computers. How would you go in explaining this stuff if you wanted to convince somebody to switch to another browser?

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

#204

Post by SippinLean »

21 wrote: post #185
manigandham wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bad example. In technical progress, Chrome is the complete opposite of IE (which seems to be replaced by Safari these days) and way better than the rest in pushing forward new features. Also 99% of the time Firefox and Edge work just fine. EDIT: Yes, IE was great in the beginning, but then it stagnated and earned the wide reputation of being terrible obsolete anchor that it is now known for. It's with this l…

I think you forget that in it's time IE was massively innovative. It was IE who added XMLHttpRequest and invented AJAX.

And IE4 added webfonts, still doesn't mean that IE6 & 7 were the least standards-compliant browsers of their time, in contrast to modern day Chrome.

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

#205

Post by lrem »

danShumway wrote: post #184
lrem wrote: post #126

As a Googler with no connection to the Chrome team: I'm pretty sure they made this change in good faith and are shocked people don't like it. Just imagine yourself in their shoes: wouldn't your first instinct be to explain yourself?

The Chrome team has been shocked about a lot lately. I give them the benefit of the doubt on their intentions (although I'm less sure about upper management). But regardless of their intentions, they need to get better at thinking ahead. Situations like this are always a little complicated, so I don't want to oversimplify or claim that they should have been psychic. But... it really shouldn't have been hard to tell t…

There is a process where external launches need to be approved by a separate privacy team. If you're certain you can do a better job, you can find some listings on https://careers.google.com/ (just search for privacy).

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

#206

Post by joshuamorton »

tedivm wrote: post #191
joshuamorton wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(if my understanding is correct) Consider the case of two users, Alice and Bob. Alice has sync enabled, Bob does not. Bob wants to check his email on Alice's computer, so he logs Alice off and logs into to his account. This syncs across all website he visits (due to shared auth cookies), but doesn't sync to the browser itself. Chrome is still logged into Alice's account, so Bob's browsing history is synced, but to Al…

If Bob logs into Alice's computer and forgets to log out all she has to do is hit the "sync" button and she can now view everything that's his synced with his account. Previously she would have at most his email, now she has that and more. To me that seems like a decrease in privacy.

I don't want to get too far into specifics because I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure there are a number of inaccuracies in this comment.

Notably, synced data would have been visible in myaccount.google.com already, and if he had syncing disabled, I don't think there wouldn't be any data synced with his account to view.

In other words, assuming Alice was nefarious, yes this is still terrible, but I don't think it's just still terrible, not worse terrible.

Edit: I'm rate limited, but to clarify, yes syncing is an account wide setting, hence you need to be authenticated to a specific account to change it. The entire point of syncing is to sync data between browsers on different devices.

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

#207

Post by magicalist »

21 wrote: post #185
manigandham wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bad example. In technical progress, Chrome is the complete opposite of IE (which seems to be replaced by Safari these days) and way better than the rest in pushing forward new features. Also 99% of the time Firefox and Edge work just fine. EDIT: Yes, IE was great in the beginning, but then it stagnated and earned the wide reputation of being terrible obsolete anchor that it is now known for. It's with this l…

I think you forget that in it's time IE was massively innovative. It was IE who added XMLHttpRequest and invented AJAX.

> It was IE who added XMLHttpRequest and invented AJAX

...in 1999. Then IE6 was released in 2001, and then Microsoft scrapped the Internet Explorer team and didn't release another browser for 5 years, leaving us with 90%+ of users stuck on IE6 bugs and non-standard features.

That's what the GP is talking about.

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

#208

Post by grey-area »

joshuamorton wrote: post #180
allenz wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of signing in at all for users who don't use sync?

(if my understanding is correct) Consider the case of two users, Alice and Bob. Alice has sync enabled, Bob does not. Bob wants to check his email on Alice's computer, so he logs Alice off and logs into to his account. This syncs across all website he visits (due to shared auth cookies), but doesn't sync to the browser itself. Chrome is still logged into Alice's account, so Bob's browsing history is synced, but to Al…

Bob wants to check his email on Alice's computer, so he logs Alice off and logs into to his account. This syncs across all website he visits...make sure no one else can accidentally (or intentionally) siphon away your browsing history.

Don't do that then.

There's a simple solution to this conundrum, but it involves google not hoovering up the browsing history of half the world by default. Unsurprisingly, the google team has decided not to implement that solution and instead has tied logins on a web page to logins in a browser ever more tightly, and this move is just another step on that road, until you can tell yourself that 99% of the world logs in to the browser, because it's just easier, so we'll make it opt out instead, and then by a series of small incremental steps, each of which seems reasonable, you're forcing users to log into google and send them your data to get any browsing done at all.

Logging in to the browser is the problem here, not the solution. You should log in to websites, not the browser, that separation is a good one and is there for very good reasons.

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

#209

Post by sam_goody »

manigandham wrote: post #154
mulmen wrote: post #132

Chrome has been the new IE for years. "just use chrome" is an endless refrain from webdevs who don't want to test on Firefox. Not sure why it is so hard for people to see what is going on here. Google has a massive conflict of interest with their web development efforts. This is classic Microsoft-esque Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

That's a bad example. In technical progress, Chrome is the complete opposite of IE (which seems to be replaced by Safari these days) and way better than the rest in pushing forward new features. Also 99% of the time Firefox and Edge work just fine. EDIT: Yes, IE was great in the beginning, but then it stagnated and earned the wide reputation of being terrible obsolete anchor that it is now known for. It's with this l…

Some of Chrome's decisions are definitely IE-like.

For example, the FF team felt that flex/grid should become the new layout standard, and deprecated or accidental behaviors of the past could be sunset by doing it right on Flex/Grid. So, for example, margin-top: 10% would be percent of height instead of percent of width when on a flexbox or grid item.[1]

Chrome did it their way and wouldn't discuss the issue, and eventually FF caved because Chrome has a near-monopoly.

This idea of implementing bad design and forcing it on the world, won't end well for the user.

Not to mention the whole recent hullaboo about hiding the www / m / whatever prefixes.

[1] https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2085 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17927972

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

#210

Post by richjdsmith »

heywot wrote: post #98
tedivm wrote: 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've been considering switching over to Firefox after being a day-one adopter of Chrome and this helped become a tipping point to get me to switch over. Though, full disclosure: I've been working to limit Google services in my day-to-day life (Maps, Gmail, and now Chrome) in the last couple of months over privacy concerns.

I made the tentative switch last fall to try out their much touted Quantum when it was newly released. A year later and I haven't looked back.
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