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

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381–390 of 507 posts

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

#381
when my employer at the time asked for a research on ad blockers, I concluded we could 1 offer better content with a community focus, or 2 provide the browser with the best ad blocker, that could still show some of our ads.

we did the cost analysis of the later and decided it was too expensive at the time. a few months later google dropped firefox support and invested heavily on chrome.

I guess someone there did the same analysis. because everything to this point is right on the plan. they block auto play video ads, just not theirs. they block flash ads, just not theirs. they will implement tracking protection like firefox rolled out last month, but before they will keep you logged on their ad systems forever.

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

#382

I'm currently logged into Gmail. When I click the little upper-right icon in Chrome I see a button saying "Sign in to Chrome", implying I'm not currently signed in. "About Google Chrome" tells me I'm on version 69.0.3497.100 (on OSX). So I don't appear to be experiencing this issue. What am I missing?

You're missing nothing - this is the intended behavior. People are falsely reporting that you are automatically signed in to chrome sync, which isn't true.

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

#383
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your shirt was probably made by a chinese consortium too. why not touch opera because of that? americans.

Sorry to disappoint but I’m not American nor do I own any clothing from China (or any other countries that may rely on sweat shops for production). From a security and privacy standpoint though there are possible implications when a tech-product/service is owned/controlled by a Chinese company. China’s influence on it’s businesses (especially tech related) can’t be denied. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if news woul…

i didnt mean to offend you either, it just seemed like more of a xenophobic than technical argument.

apple is lauded for the security and privacy of the iphone but it is manufactured in china. could china have their hands in that "cooking pot"?

if there were some kind of subterfuge occurring with opera at the hands of the chinese government, it would be newsworthy indeed.

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use checkboxes?

When you have a checkbox for every possible customisation option, you end up with a commercial airliner cockpit - hundreds of flashing lights and switches, that you need a comprehensive manual and years of experience to properly operate.

that's a huge silly fallacy.

if you are operating something as complex and dangerous, you need the Comercial airliner cockpit! it's that way for a reason! or would you rather board a 747 with a huge colorful button "fly" and another "land"?

if you have something like a browser, that is your last line of defense accessing online banking etc, you need to see into the miriad of options. if you just browse facebook, use the default and be happy. Knowing about:config shouldn't be a gate keeper to anything! going to settings then advanced should be more than enough to communicate the concept of advanced options. anything different you are just being an entitled , incompetent UX designer.

about:config is lazy, but get some of the job done. your oh-so-perfect two options google chrome setting page, is lazy and useless.

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

#385
post #328
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rea…

That 0.1% doesn't take into account hours spent using the actual app. Power users tend to spend all day in a browser whereas a typical grandma might look at it for 15 minutes and close it. Meanwhile people who have multiple Google accounts and who spend literally all day in the browser are the ones that get the short end of the stick? That makes zero sense and it's why people are starting to hate Google just like any…

If all the power users leave, the app makers do not care. If all the typical grandmas leave, their margins are significantly impacted.

You can figure out the rest.

That’s not a problem or an indictment. Just an observation of how systems work st scale.

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

#386
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How is sending my personal passwords to a server under Google's control an increase in my privacy? If this change did that, I might be inclined to agree with you. But as far as I know, it doesn't. You still have to explicitly opt in to syncing. Which is a no-op compared to the old behavior.

Look in the OP for the phrase "Mistaken synchronisation". You'll land at a section where he verified the steps by which a confused user could easily turn on synchronization without understanding that they had done so. Does this change your opinion?

Note that I explicitly mentioned this as the one consideration that was mildly convincing:

>I think I've seen exactly one potentially compelling argument, which is that it may now be easier to accidentally enable syncing when you don't want to, since its a single click instead of entering a password.

Personally, though, (and I want to highlight that this is just my opinion as a person) I don't think it's a regression. But I can understand why others might disagree. From what I've read, the old behavior was that logging in enabled syncing by default. So accidentally logging in would immediately sync things.

I've certainly made the mistake of logging into the wrong account in the wrong chrome window, so I could absolutely see a user making the same mistake previously.

But even if you disagree, I think "you can synchronize by mistake, so they should add a confirmation dialogue" (which is a change I would support!) puts this firmly into the realm of imperfect UX and not an attack on privacy that should be totally rolled back.

And the aggravating (and potentially harmful) thing is that we can't even approach the discussion of "should we add a confirmation box", which would address the UX issue, if the accusation is that it's an attack on privacy. First we have to have this long tiring discussion where people throw around words like "Orwellian" and "GDPR" and we get to the reality that people are complaining about a whole host of not-really-harmful things, and that the one actually-maybe-harmful thing is a confirmation dialogue.

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

#387
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 0.1% doesn't take into account hours spent using the actual app. Power users tend to spend all day in a browser whereas a typical grandma might look at it for 15 minutes and close it. Meanwhile people who have multiple Google accounts and who spend literally all day in the browser are the ones that get the short end of the stick? That makes zero sense and it's why people are starting to hate Google just like any…

If all the power users leave, the app makers do not care. If all the typical grandmas leave, their margins are significantly impacted. You can figure out the rest. That’s not a problem or an indictment. Just an observation of how systems work st scale.

How do you think Firefox and Chrome overthrew IE? The power users (us) who set up and fix everyone else's computers spent years telling others why IE is terrible and installed a different browser, and it slowly but surely worked (along with strong developer and media/press support).

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

#388
post #308

I'm still not clear about what the actual change in behavior even is - seeing some statements on Twitter from someone on the dev team, it sounded to me like there isn't actually any difference, just a UI change to show which Gmail account is currently logged into. If that's really all it is, I don't really get what people are upset about. Specifically, if there's no additional data being stored connected to your acco…

Now if you log into a Google account, Chrome is logged into that same account as well. Also if you clear all cookies, cookies from Google aren't cleared. Some people (myself included) don't like that.

> Also if you clear all cookies, cookies from Google aren't cleared.

Wait, WHAT? Are you talking about locally or in sync? I don't believe Sync ever included cookies, and there's no indication on the Clear Browsing Data tool that Google cookies won't be cleared if "All Time" is selected.

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

#389
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 0.1% doesn't take into account hours spent using the actual app. Power users tend to spend all day in a browser whereas a typical grandma might look at it for 15 minutes and close it. Meanwhile people who have multiple Google accounts and who spend literally all day in the browser are the ones that get the short end of the stick? That makes zero sense and it's why people are starting to hate Google just like any…

If all the power users leave, the app makers do not care. If all the typical grandmas leave, their margins are significantly impacted. You can figure out the rest. That’s not a problem or an indictment. Just an observation of how systems work st scale.

That's very short term focused observation though. Power users are influencers. When power users leave - especially being annoyed and angry - they start to actively advise against the product left and right, to the regular users and to other power users.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use checkboxes?

When you have a checkbox for every possible customisation option, you end up with a commercial airliner cockpit - hundreds of flashing lights and switches, that you need a comprehensive manual and years of experience to properly operate.

Windows have a registry, Firefox - about:config, Linux - kconfig and sysfs. You don't need to make it Boeing way, but you need it.
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