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Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

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Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#131

Post by xvector »

netwanderer2 wrote: post #81

Google should be very careful with these aggressive tactics. They are quickly losing many users. There are other options available nowadays, including browser like Brave. I personally have switched back to Firefox. I still like Google but they are falling into the same old trap of not listening to their users. The moment they let that escalated and there are other viable options then the game is over.

> They are quickly losing many users.

While I'd also like to think this, the reality is that any number of users they've lost would be negligible at best.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#132

Post by billpaxtonjr »

sneak wrote: post #126
newscracker wrote: post #26

Thanks, but no thanks. Ditch Chrome and don’t worry about ugly hacks to remember or bookmark or ask about in the future when they no longer work. Life is too short to put up with such nonsense. There are better alternatives [1] available. P.S.: When you uninstall Chrome on certain platforms, it’ll open your default browser and direct you to a feedback page. Be honest and tell them why, and that you wouldn’t recommend…

Ditching Chrome is not an option for the security conscious; there is no other browser that has the security resources dedicated to it that Chrome has. It’s not even close.

Do these security changes get rolled into Chromium?

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#133

Post by dsfyu404ed »

dylan604 wrote: post #108
reacharavindh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add one more to your side note. Please tell your particularly non technical friends and relatives to avoid Google like plague if they care about privacy. Show them how - give a link to Firefox, Privacy badger. A relative of mine who paid $7/month for a VPN service because he cared about his privacy from ISP, but was using Google Chrome and Gmail for sensitive personal Email. Fewer people from the non-engineering…

>Please tell your particularly non technical friends and relatives to avoid Google like plague For anyone that has never had a conversation like this, you really have to be careful with this and pick your battles wisely. Some people are so non-technical, that they will not understand what you are explaining to them, or why you are even bothering them. You will be perceived as a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist…

I find it really easy to pitch privacy in a "do you really want your medical insurer to know that you're googling weight loss or pregnancy stuff?", "do you really want your future employers to know what kind of dank memes you looked at?", "when you're booking a hotel the price will go up because they'll know you've looked at it before and want to fake a sense of urgency so you buy" sort of way. Providing concrete examples of how a lack of privacy can cost money seems to be useful.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#134

Post by sandov »

occamrazor wrote: post #74
reacharavindh wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The day is not that far, when you look to buy say car insurance, and you get $XYZ as a quote. Your ur friend gets $ABC where $ABC Is there a way you could prevent this? Yes, if you care about privacy and not let someone build that database in the first place. It's not only/always the NSA that we need to worry about.. You can already see this in some sense. A flight ticket could cost more if you look for it using a Ma…

> Is there a way you could prevent this? Yes, regulations on insurance pricing factors and on use of personal data.

Yeah, who needs freedom anyway?

Your solution is worse than the problem.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#135

Post by netwanderer2 »

xvector wrote: post #131
netwanderer2 wrote: post #81

Google should be very careful with these aggressive tactics. They are quickly losing many users. There are other options available nowadays, including browser like Brave. I personally have switched back to Firefox. I still like Google but they are falling into the same old trap of not listening to their users. The moment they let that escalated and there are other viable options then the game is over.

> They are quickly losing many users. While I'd also like to think this, the reality is that any number of users they've lost would be negligible at best.

For now yes, but the tech world has showed us similar lessons before. I bet Blackberry and Nokia executives said the same thing when Apple introduced the first iPhone. MySpace was very confident when they deemed Facebook number of users was negligible as well. Unfortunately privacy issues are only getting bigger in the future. That's why I said Google should be very careful not to tread down the same path. Only those who learned lessons from the past will survive. I love Google so I hope they won't get too comfortable with data mining activities and lose track of keeping their users who are the real data sources.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#136

Post by 0x54D5 »

sneak wrote: post #122
flossyspeaker wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an old as time debate of "Security vs Convenience". It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https? Same thing with letting Google start to categorize and selling your profile to organizations. It might be nice now, but in 5-10 years what will the landscape look like? It's ultimately your choice to determine how much o…

Giving up privacy for most people is not a security reduction. Privacy is extremely important, but it is relevant only to a tiny minority of people who care about it or otherwise require it. Most people neither care nor use their rights to privacy, so in practice, losing it, for them, is no real loss. It is an increase in convenience—at no cost. The cost is a societal one, borne only when “no privacy” becomes a wides…

Let's say I don't care about privacy at all. Let's say I wanted to just logout of one Google account so that I can login to another one. They disabled the logout button today on mobile. It's now using your Android preferences. Meanwhile on PC it logically would probably log you out of sync as well. Then I login to my burner google account and oh look all my bookmarks and sync settings just copied from one account to the other.

This seems broken to me in many ways. It only works well if you only have one account.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#137

Post by jonbronson »

jasonkester wrote: post #56

Keep in mind that while everybody here is all outraged about this, nobody else is. Because the experience is so nice. It's the reason why I can search for "prefecture Melun" on my laptop, then jump in the car, open up maps on my phone, Start typing "1" and watch it suggest "12 rue de Gambas, Melun 77320", which happens to be the address of the Melun prefecture. That sort of thing happens for me every day, and i think…

"Because the experience is so nice."

If the experience is "so nice" why are so many people outraged? The data suggests this is a terrible experience to look up and suddenly see you've been auto-logged into a browser without your consent. Terrible UX.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#138

Post by TheDong »

flossyspeaker wrote: post #113
jasonkester wrote: post #56

Keep in mind that while everybody here is all outraged about this, nobody else is. Because the experience is so nice. It's the reason why I can search for "prefecture Melun" on my laptop, then jump in the car, open up maps on my phone, Start typing "1" and watch it suggest "12 rue de Gambas, Melun 77320", which happens to be the address of the Melun prefecture. That sort of thing happens for me every day, and i think…

This is an old as time debate of "Security vs Convenience". It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https? Same thing with letting Google start to categorize and selling your profile to organizations. It might be nice now, but in 5-10 years what will the landscape look like? It's ultimately your choice to determine how much o…

> It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https?

I think that's a totally different issue and I think it's harmful to this discussion to bring such an issue in.

The case of http vs https is not one of user security vs user convenience; it's user security vs sysadmin convenience.

There's a different tradeoff with giving user's more security which is less convenient for you to maintain, and you typically should do this (this is stuff like https, supporting 2fa, etc).

The better comparison is sharing data with third parties to provide users conveniences. This is a comparison between user's data security and user's convenience. That's the tradeoff being discussed.

Bringing in unrelated things like http vs https will only serve to muddy the waters and damage your point.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#139

Post by jonbronson »

sandov wrote: post #134
occamrazor wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there a way you could prevent this? Yes, regulations on insurance pricing factors and on use of personal data.

Yeah, who needs freedom anyway? Your solution is worse than the problem.

How is regulation to protect people from being taken advantage of by malicious data-mining practices "worse" than the actual practice of maliciously mining data to rip people off?

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#140

Post by sanbor »

sneak wrote: post #122
flossyspeaker wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an old as time debate of "Security vs Convenience". It's a lot easier to maintain web servers if they are only using the http protocol and not https. Does that mean I should not enable https? Same thing with letting Google start to categorize and selling your profile to organizations. It might be nice now, but in 5-10 years what will the landscape look like? It's ultimately your choice to determine how much o…

Giving up privacy for most people is not a security reduction. Privacy is extremely important, but it is relevant only to a tiny minority of people who care about it or otherwise require it. Most people neither care nor use their rights to privacy, so in practice, losing it, for them, is no real loss. It is an increase in convenience—at no cost. The cost is a societal one, borne only when “no privacy” becomes a wides…

The NSA revelations shown that governments are doing mass surveillance for real and it is not just a nonsense conspiracy. Right now maybe only ver few might get affected by this. But if in the future the people in power use that information against you or your people you will regret it to exchange your privacy for convenience.
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