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Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

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Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#171

Post by newscracker »

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…

> 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. Some people will understand what you are explaining and might even understand your stance, but ultimately will still continue in their ways because it's so much easier and convenient.

This is a very common reaction I've seen. People don't care as much about privacy as one would assume they might when given some information about it. It's like a case of extreme apathy triggered and nurtured by ignorance. Add to this the convenience factor of Gmail or similar platforms, it's a big task.

But I have seen that there are at least a few people who, over time, get the heeby-jeebies about privacy intrusions. That's a good result compared to not telling them about this over and over for a long time.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#172

Post by newscracker »

pmontra wrote: post #123
radmuzom wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I regularly argue about this with my colleagues who are all mostly trained statisticians with some programming experience. Generally, what happens is that people are in awe of the "innovation" coming from Google and my protests are generally laughed off.

There are things that can be explained but can be understood only by direct experience. This is one of them. They'll eventually get burned by their faith in Google and suddenly they'll understand.

Latching on to GP's context, statistically speaking, most people don't see these issues themselves. So they don't care if one in a million or even one in a hundred might get affected. As long as they (or their close ones) haven't experienced it, it doesn't exist and doesn't matter. It's exhausting to deal with such people, and most of the general public are this way.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#173

Post by rstuart4133 »

kannanvijayan wrote: post #25
c16 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this also. Gmail or anything by Google within Firefox is painful. Very very painful.

Just a heads up, but we are actively working on improving the situation here, and should have releases coming out that steadily and progressively improves the experience on this front. It is an area of major focus after the initial Quantum Flow effort, and we have technical fixes in many places in the pipeline to address this. (I work on the Javascript engine in Firefox, and improving our story here is one of my pers…

If you want a site the is just horrible in Firefox Mobile, try: http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/meteye/ This is a Australian Government site, so there is no Google shenanigans going on here.

You are meant to zoom in on a locality on the interactive map, and then pan around by dragging. Panning works fine in Chrome. The panning is so slow in Firefox Mobile it's unusable . (It's fine on Firefox desktop, but I'm guessing the shear horsepower available on a desktop CPU hides the problem).

It's a bit sad, because it's a page I use a lot. Whatever it is, it effects a lot of similar pages.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#174

Post by beenBoutIT »

sneak wrote: post #124
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…

Also, even those of us who care about privacy are not all outraged about this. I have been using Chrome Sync (with a clientside encryption passphrase) for years. It always surprised me that there were separate login states for gmail and the browser. This change saves me a step, and reduces user confusion too.

Exactly. This just streamlines the login process and cuts the number of times users enter their password in half.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#175

Post by Ntrails »

sanbor wrote: post #140
sneak wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Alternatively if the people not in power have a revolution and murder all of us working in finance... well shucks I guess that could be something I'd regret.

Waving around arbitrary threats doesn't help if the people you're preaching to view them as low likelihood.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#177

Post by katslime »

Lazeb wrote: post #96

Once again another reminder that the need for open source alternatives with minimal to no logging is shown to be a greater necessity in an age where these companies know us better than the government. We can continue to pretend these companies are non-partisan and won't use the data collected for political influence, everyone here is obviously impervious to such influences, but the bigger concern is its influence on…

I think people would rather trade their security for convenience, which in the first place is why Chrome is so popular, with its inbuilt tie-in to Google services. Sure, you could provide an open-source browser that's security focused, but what makes it compelling to the end-user to switch away from Chrome? I don't think many laymen particularly care about this situation.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#178

Post by nolok »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #160
nolok wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having the same settings/history/bookmarks/extensions shared between my main laptop, my cheapo 10" notebook I use when in on the beach or in a plane etc ..., and my phone. Being able, in three clicks, to re-open on my computer a tab I closed on my phone a couple hours ago. For me that's it.

That doesn't benefit from the Google account synergy like the other examples. You get that if you log in to Firefox.

Uhhh, yeah, but the question wasn't "what is something Chrome offers you that you can't replace", it's "what do you get by getting logged in that you enjoy". I'm sure competitors offer the same sort of thing.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#179

Post by type0 »

bzbarsky wrote: post #167
izzydata wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems hard to believe as it would imply that they have code specifically to cripple the Firefox experience. It's probably at worst that they intentionally don't optimize their sites for Firefox and not actively making it worse.

Google does a lot of UA sniffing, and serves different sites to different browsers. The sites served to non-Chrome receive less QA resources, as far as I can tell, and are often buggy in various ways. Simply spoofing the Chrome UA in Firefox on Android can often get you a site that works better (in Firefox) than the one served to Firefox by default.

Sometimes this happens on the desktop as well, they optimize for the latest Chrome and the "latest" Firefox ESR - so here we are, Chrome is the reincarnation of IE6'6'6 the definition of evil in the software world.

Re: Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync

#180

Post by ac4tw »

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…

I think this is my favorite quote for discussions that start out like yours:

“Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different from saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say. – Edward Snowden”

Maybe I'm foolish, but I have this hope that a shift from the "make money off of mining your data" business model to something else, perhaps like crypto/tokens enable, might just enable the convenience you speak of, without forcing me to sell my information because everyone else didn't care to value their data.

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