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Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

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Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#311

Post by r3bl »

TekMol wrote: post #299
RossM wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what is the user facing benefit? Syncing bookmarks, recently opened tabs, passwords, autofill(?). These are genuine benefits when you're working with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. Whether they're worth the cost of data mining is another matter of course.

These are genuine benefits when you're working with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. I work with all of these devices. Yet I don't want any of that syncing. The thought that Google wants to send my 'recently opened tabs' to their servers makes me shudder. So they get the whole browsing history of every one of their users? Of all the pages that have nothing to do with them? Same with passwords. So they have a gi…

One advantage that wasn't mentioned is the ability to send a tab between devices.

I'm looking at something on my desktop, have to go somewhere, so I just send the tabs to my phone and continue consuming. If I forget to do so, I can also use the url bar to search through common history, so that I could enter a few words from the title and go back to that article.

That being said, I personally wouldn't trust Google to do this, so I use Firefox that I believe encrypts data client-side by default.

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#312

Post by salvar »

justinclift wrote: post #302
piyush_soni wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They clearly write in the blog that they'll make changes in Chrome 70 which will release in mid-october.

k, wasn't sure. I don't track the Chrome release schedule at all, so figured it was probably quarterly. Sounds like it's monthly then. Looking again, yep mid-October. So, no rush then. A couple of weeks worth of extra data collection it is then.

Yes, I'm sure the code is ready but some evil mastermind twisted their mustache and said "No... let's collect two weeks more of data! Bwahahahaha!"

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#313

Post by nadahalli »

TekMol wrote: post #299
RossM wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what is the user facing benefit? Syncing bookmarks, recently opened tabs, passwords, autofill(?). These are genuine benefits when you're working with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. Whether they're worth the cost of data mining is another matter of course.

These are genuine benefits when you're working with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. I work with all of these devices. Yet I don't want any of that syncing. The thought that Google wants to send my 'recently opened tabs' to their servers makes me shudder. So they get the whole browsing history of every one of their users? Of all the pages that have nothing to do with them? Same with passwords. So they have a gi…

It's possible that I want my passwords (of other sites) synced on all instances of Chrome across my devices, but I don't want Google to know these passwords (obviously). They have an "encrypt-passwords" feature for that.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139

Perhaps you have never visited passwords.google.com :-)

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#315

Post by shawnz »

TekMol wrote: post #299
RossM wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what is the user facing benefit? Syncing bookmarks, recently opened tabs, passwords, autofill(?). These are genuine benefits when you're working with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. Whether they're worth the cost of data mining is another matter of course.

These are genuine benefits when you're working with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. I work with all of these devices. Yet I don't want any of that syncing. The thought that Google wants to send my 'recently opened tabs' to their servers makes me shudder. So they get the whole browsing history of every one of their users? Of all the pages that have nothing to do with them? Same with passwords. So they have a gi…

> The thought that Google wants to send my 'recently opened tabs' to their servers makes me shudder. So they get the whole browsing history of every one of their users?

They claim sync data is end-to-end encrypted. However they would already have your browsing history if you have address bar suggestions enabled.

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#316

Post by aasasd »

RossM wrote: post #295
TekMol wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to be logged in in my browser at all Same here. Why does Chrome log you in in the first place? I mean I know it from the companies perspective of course. They want to consolidate as much data about you as possible. And tie you into their ecosystem. But what is the user facing benefit? Syncing your bookmarks across devices?

> But what is the user facing benefit? Syncing bookmarks, recently opened tabs, passwords, autofill(?). These are genuine benefits when you're working with laptops, desktops, phones and tablets. Whether they're worth the cost of data mining is another matter of course.

There is, or at least was, a notable feature that synced data can be encrypted with a separate password, client-side. I can't vouch for its strength, but it's there.

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#317

Post by codewiz »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #296

I don't see how having the sign-in sync turned on by default can be compatible with "privacy by design and default" as mandated e.g. by the GDPR. I wonder if they will have to offer a EU version of Chrome soon therefore. Anyway, 90-95 % of users will probably just stick with the default value because they either don't know about the option or don't care enough to change it, hence from Google's perspective introducing…

Isn't Chrome sync data encrypted end-to-end?

Matthew Green's blogpost made it sound like Google had access to everybody's authentication cookies and cleartext passwords. Comments on both HN and cryptographyengineering.com show that this is what users actually believe now.

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#318

Post by lrpublic »

hendzen wrote: post #203
lrpublic wrote: post #202

Too little, too late. The cat is really and truly out of the bag. As Microsoft did with Windows 10 Google have done with Chrome they have moved the capture of telemetry and personal data from their network to the users platform. In the case of Chrome the community have the choice to fork our platform and thank google for their contribution, but say no thanks to thier continued stuardship of it. Sometimes I wonder if…

Who is committing to chrome? Who is fixing bugs reported by users? Google employees. The community is... mostly users. Any fork of Chrome will likely fail, because there is no magical community of privacy minded developers that has the time and expertise to develop Chrome, which is a massive and highly complex piece of software. If you really feel this way, just switch to Firefox. Mozilla actually has a team of devel…

Look at Centos - it’s quite possible to follow Google’s releases stripping out the ‘evil’

Re: Product Updates Based on Your Feedback

#319

Post by DanielBMarkham »

"...While we think sign-in consistency will help many of our users..."

There's the nub of the thing, and it's not just Google. Like the old song goes, everybody wants to rule the world. That is, if you have a popular service, you buy up other stuff, add on stuff you can do. Pretty soon your users have multiple accounts all over the place. You gotta go to some kind of single sign-on, right?

It's not that it's a bad idea, it's that it's the kind of idea that shouldn't apply to the universe. It's fine when it's your corporate site. Who wants to log into three dozen corporate systems? But when you get FB tracking you everywhere, Google integrating what you thought was a browsing app with it's universe of offerings....it doesn't work.

Yes, users probably wanted it, just like some of them want you to turn the damned thing off. But the key problem here is that single companies shouldn't be in the business of controlling all the information flow. Any architectural decision they make has social/political implications. For this chrome thing, they're trying to position google as the internet, not a place you go on the internet. Everybody wants to do that. And they all claim it's to help the users. But I don't want a company being the same thing as the internet, no matter what Aunt Sarah wants. It's not good for the rest of us. Add to that the way this was done, and then the engineering team being clueless?

It's not that they set out to do anything wrong. At some point, anything you do is wrong. You just have too much freaking power.

Google is at that point.

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