I work at Google; opinions are my own.
> 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.
My impression is that this is the new norm at Google. It happens with everything, internal or external. The sad reality is that most decisions will deeply upset at least some people, and those people likely don't have the context into the decisions but still complain loudly.
From my perspective what happens is that it doesn't matter whether a decision was a good or bad one, there will be people who complain (ESPECIALLY internally as Googlers can be very entitled) and so at some point you're just completely immune to this.
This is not helped by the fact that people externally often think Google is on some evil plan and speculate in wild ways which are completely wrong.
To give you an idea of how these things usually happen.. it goes something like this..
Someone finds a UX problem, and makes a plan to fix it. In this case I guess it's confusion among signed on accounts. Someone on the team probably raises some concerns, likely similar if not the exact ones being raised now, and they debate it but eventually they say well, the proportion of people who seem to care about this is only 0.1% of users (Because we are objective!).
Sadly, even though it's "only" 0.1% of users, those users are extremely negatively impacted in a way that's not really reflected by the small percentage, and 0.1% of a billion is still a considerable amount.
On the other hand, there are many other decisions which were released just fine and we would not be able to do anything if we were always afraid of negatively impacting some small proportion of users. To me this is a weakness of the attempt to have everything be objective and "measurable".
Let me state that I don't think this is good or even acceptable, but I'm definitely not smart enough to know how to solve this on a wider scale than my immediate team. However I hope this at least provides some insight into why these kinds of thing happen.