Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.lukaszolejnik.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

481–490 of 507 posts

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

#481

Post by Lio »

Lio wrote: post #471
Lio wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Firefox work with Gooogle Hangouts/Meet/“whatever it’s called now”? I know they were working on removing the need for plugins in other browsers. Ut last time I checked it was still a bit iffy. This is what’s keeping Chrom(e|ium) installed on my machines right now. (I have a customer that uses it extensively). If Hangouts works in Firefox I think I'll uninstall Chrome.

To answer my own question, yes Hangouts does work fine in Firefox. Not tried screen sharing yet but video calls work for me.

Nope. To expand my answer, only certain versions of Hangouts work with Firefox, sigh.

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

#482

Post by jillesvangurp »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #213
lrem wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already do. There is a strong internal culture of argument and we do tend to use critical news, forum or blog posts as anecdata points. The higher quality and quantity of external voices on a subject, the better argument can be made one way or another. So please keep them coming, but do remember that usually the best result of those is starting proper research into the topic, which then can show that the best for t…

If there's strong internal argumentation, why is everyone so surprised by and bad at reacting to the criticism?

It's called confirmation bias. They are looking for positive evidence confirming how awesome they are and are blind to evidence of the contrary. Not only are they blind but they seem genuinely confused why people are disagreeing with them so much. From the outside this is an obvious PR disaster. It shouldn't need debating. It's that bad.

I imagine the internal mailing lists are going to be a fun read the next few days. I was on similar mailing lists in Nokia when the iphone launched. I'll spare you the details but Nokia suffered from a similarly bad case of confirmation bias and it was decision making based on that in the years before and after that ultimately led to them getting out of the phone business entirely a mere 7 years after being the dominant market leader (and not by any small margin). Confirmation bias kills companies.

Anyone from Google/alphabet still capable of making a difference reading this, here's some free advice: sort out your management ASAP. This is one of those issues that stems from a lack of leadership. Heads need to roll, especially the ones doing too much nodding. I'd start at the top. I've had my doubts about the current CEO for a while. Too invisible and stuff like this keeps happening on his watch. Also the product portfolio seems a mess lately. There's something wrong there and current leadership is part of the problem.

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

#483

Post by grappler »

i2shar wrote: post #374
tedivm wrote: post #3

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. I really expect this change to push a lot of people away from Chrome, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if it started opening up more antitrust possibilit…

It's about privacy and also about taking away functionality that worked all these years for me. At work we use Google Apps and I sign in as with my work address for Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, etc. and am used to one click access to all these apps. But I like to sync my bookmarks, extensions and settings to my personal account - and that's it - I don't want to sign in to my personal Gmail, Docs, Drive in the browse…

Firefox with the "Multi-Account Containers" add-on is pretty great for managing multiple identities. Browser tabs get labels (with color-coded stripes) for which container they belong to.

I can ignore identity switchers provided by a site (google in this case) and just keep two gmail tabs, one for personal and one for work, open right next to one another. Firefox keeps each one sandboxed with its own session info like cookies etc.

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

#484

Post by latexr »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #465
fandango wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just. use. Firefox.

I'll never understand this hesitation to Firefox, some people will bring out why Firefox is evil yet Chrome is clearly not the lesser evil product. I started using Chrome when it first came out, and then I stopped using it when it didn't have adblocking. Then when it did have adblocking it was extremely limited (I kept seeing popups and other nuisances), this was when I got dispelled then about Google being an ad foc…

> I'll never understand this hesitation to Firefox

In my case, I don‘t switch to Firefox because they don’t support AppleScript and it’s a feature I use every day.

Less than an hour ago, on another HN thread, I saw another macOS user claiming they won’t switch to Firefox because it doesn’t support Keychain.

Every time there’s this conversation, I see a bunch of macOS users complaining about performance.

In sum, a bunch of users (particularly macOS users) don’t switch to Firefox because it plain sucks for their needs.

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

#485

Post by [deleted] »

auslander wrote: post #454
claudius wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ublock Origin blocks third-party content, including silly fonts hosted by Google, just fine for me.

I recall seeing fonts.googleapi.com being allowed by uBO (in medium mode) once, so it needs be double checked. Also, it not just fonts, but jquery and other stuff. And two places to check: Referrers HTTP header and meta element Referrer Policy of the page

[deleted]

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

#486

Post by nmridul »

thirdsun wrote: post #464
adrianrocamora wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FF with Multi Account Containers is heaven

It is. One feature I'd like to see added is a separate history for every container. Currently the global history is shared between all containers.

+1 for this.

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

#487

Post by torstenvl »

grey-area wrote: post #449
torstenvl wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not doing me a favor. Software companies need to stop believing their own paternalistic propaganda. Nobody at Google is in a position to determine whether they are doing me a favor or not.

It was sarcasm, this is how the google workers rationalise this to themselves (see other posts on this thread).

Sorry, my mistake.

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

#488

Post by lknik »

wglb wrote: post #269

I am baffled by The particular Article 25 of GDPR is rarely seriously and meaningfully discussed in practice, not least because probably still almost nobody actually knows what the “data protection by design” even means . This seems to be a confusion straight out of a five-stages of grief denial of GDPR principles. Let's work this through: Step 1: Are you collecting personal data? Step 2: If so, are you obtaining con…

Hi, original author of the linked post here. Thanks for the input. However, consent is not related to the concept. In fact it's more about taking into account the state of the art, the cost of implementation and the nature, scope, context and purposes of processing as well as the risks of varying likelihood and severity for rights and freedoms of natural persons posed by the processing, the controller shall, both at the time of the determination of the means for processing and at the time of the processing itself, implement appropriate technical and organisational measures, such as pseudonymisation, which are designed to implement data-protection principles, such as data minimisation, in an effective manner and to integrate the necessary safeguards into the processing in order to meet the requirements of this Regulation and protect the rights of data subjects.

Additionally, the controller shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures for ensuring that, by default, only personal data which are necessary for each specific purpose of the processing are processed. That obligation applies to the amount of personal data collected, the extent of their processing, the period of their storage and their accessibility. In particular, such measures shall ensure that by default personal data are not made accessible without the individual's intervention to an indefinite number of natural persons.

Thanks.

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

#489

Post by amaccuish »

notriddle wrote: post #263
amaccuish wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about popping up a message saying, "you're logging in to someone else's computer, would you like to do this in an incognito window?" Or something like, "you're signing in to a different Google account, would you like us to remember this account and preserve/sync history to account X, which is currently signed into Chrome".

> How about popping up a message Doesn't work. Between the cookie pop-ups, update notifications, and "you've got mail"s, people have learned to ignore pop-up notifications. ... of course, the real problem here started with "Bob checked his email on Alice's computer." There are so many ways it can go wrong, like Alice using a browser other than Chrome, Bob using an email service other than GMail, or Alice deliberately…

You mean like the popup of Google asking if I'd like to sync, or if I want it set as the default browser? It seems to be ok when it's in Google's favour.

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

#490

Post by munchbunny »

Semaphor wrote: post #462
munchbunny wrote: post #139

I can see why they thought this was a good change. It makes the UX for G-suite apps much more pleasant, almost like you get the full functionality of G-suite productivity stuff as part of installing Chrome. For most people, that's a good thing. I think as tech people we systematically tend to under-think the second-order effects of the systems we build. Case in point, Chrome and G-suite being that closely integrated…

> your account will get automatically downgraded to single factor authentication going forward. *your device If someone has access to my desktop PC, they also have access to my yubikey anyway.

No, I definitely meant "your account". Specifically, I meant that you will accidentally trust devices you log in on that you might not be aware of, which exposes your account to unintentional reduction to single factor. I don't only log in at home.

If Google switched it to not trusting by default, you could still trust whatever device you want, just without the risk of a default behavior working against you.

Post reply on HN