Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

The obvious problems and conflicts here are multiple.

1. People may wish to not have activity on multiple services connected or associated. This was certainly true for me when I found that G+ and YouTube accounts, independently created, though sharing a common email address, were conjoined.

2. Google is put in a position of advantage as regards online identity. This persists across several dimensions:

a). Google apps and services share an authenticator with the browser itself. Other parties must implement their own authentication schemes, unless ...

b). Third-party applications utilise the Google Chrome authenticator, in which case

i). Those third parties leak user identity, activity, and all but certainly fraud and abuse detection, including both false negative and false positive determinations, to Google.

ii). Other browser venders, including Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Opea, and others, are rendered as second-class citizens from an authentication standpoint.

iii). Consequences of a loss or freeze of an account now extend to multiple third-party services.

c). Loss or freeze of an account locks people out of their own web browser and all that entails; cookies, bookmarks, history, extensions, configurations, extensions-related data (say; Zotero).

3. The centralisation, stakes, and attractiveness of attacking people's Google identities rises yet higher. Data exfiltration, access to browser and local system state, denial-of-access attacks, and more.

The privacy, anti-trust, security, conflict-of-interest, general risk, and other implications simple boggle the mind. That this was quietly rolled out with no apparent announcement or consideration tremendously reduces my already greatly-diminished trust in Google, its leadership, and its stewardship of critical Web infrastructure and protocols.

Chromium is likewise affected.

What were they thinking?

Were they thinking?

This is speculation on my part, however given the sophistication of their tracking capabilities I would imagine they could correlate the source to (at a minimum) a grouping of related users, if not the primary user.

(Edit: remove double negative)

I am seriously considering rolling my own browser by embedding the Chromium Embedded Framework into my own GUI (or WebKit, or Gecko).

A browser should just render pages (incl. JavaScript), and save cookies if you need it to. Beyond that, there's nothing else it needs to do. Round about Netscape 4 and IE6, browsers were functionally complete. Since then they've just been gilding the lily and creating an artificial 'features race' between the browser vendors.

Sometimes, simpler IS better.

> This is very bad. There are so many reasons why I want to be able to use Gmail without having google track all of my activity across search and maps.

But I don't think this Chrome release changed anything with regards to that? It's been the case for more than a decade that if you're logged into gmail you're also logged into search, maps, apps, etc. And if you log out of one, you log out of all of them.

Whatever workflow you've been using to keep logged into gmail while avoiding being logged in to the other Google sites would still work exactly the same way. (E.g. I'm always logged into gmail and chrome, but do 99% of my searches and Youtube watching from incognito windows, so they don't get associated with my account).

Thanks for clarifying. I'm going to step slightly down from my high horse now. So, I just tested and I can still have separate "People" in Chrome browser-level settings, + incognito windows as you mentioned. I guess now I'm confused as to what actually changed then.