Google Criticized for Automatic Chrome Sign-In

[Guest]

Google updated Chrome to automatically connect someone's Google account, which is required to enable a tab-syncing feature, when they sign in to its services.

Google Criticized for Automatic Chrome Sign-In : Read more

 

[shrapnel_indie]

But neither actually resolves the main issues with this change. The fear that Google now has the potential to enable syncing without notice is still there, especially since the company remotely enabled the battery saver feature on Android smartphones by accident in mid-September. Things happen--settings are changed during the update process, bugs undermine settings, etc.

It's easy to blame an executive decision on it being a bug if the decision's action is unfavorable (at best) or downright evil in nature. It follows plausible deniability quite well as long as they can keep private memos and emails out of the wrong hands.

The other problem was the fact that everything about this change was kept secret from Chrome users. More information has become available since Green published his blog post, and Google has stressed that being signed in to Chrome doesn't automatically undermine someone's privacy, but the point is that people expect to know when something that could affect their privacy changes without a peep after years of use.

... for now it doesn't... at least until execs decide that they want it to do so... if it isn't already doing so... Chromium is the foundation of Chrome. Google is pretty much the one who is responsible for the black box permanently bolted-on extensions. Chromium itself is open-source. The bolt-ons by Google are proprietary.

We asked Google for more information about this change and a spokesperson linked us to a series of tweets from Chrome engineer and manager Adrienne Porter Felt. In addition to saying that Google is working to update Chrome's privacy policy and that merely being signed in to the browser doesn't enable the sync feature so many people are worried about, Porter Felt explained the reasoning behind the change:

The public reason behind the change sounds fine and dandy. It's the fact that Google is completely unapologetic about how it makes its money with data mining. (plus kicking their motto of doing no harm to the curb.) Plus their push (successful for a few iterations of minor changes) for NSA encryption built into the Linux kernel. Encryption that the NSA was not willing to explain in detail.

 

[DotNetMaster777]

Is this has influence to the password manager ???

I do not like this sync stuff without my permission !?

 

[bit_user]

On Linux, you can get virtually all the benefits of Chrome without the spyware with the Chromium browser.

You can also use it on Windows, but there seem to be no official [strike]binaries to download[/strike] releases.

http://www.chromium.org/Home
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)

Edit: they actually do have pre-compiled Windows binaries, but no installer:

https://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/download-chromium

 

[Mr5oh]

chrome://flags//#account-consistency <-- Put that in the URL bar, switch Account consistency to disabled. Then "assuming" you can trust google it should be turned off....

 

[cryoburner]

Google should have known this change would A) be discovered and B) rankle people who care about their privacy.

People who care about privacy probably shouldn't be using a browser from one of the largest data-mining and user-profiling advertisement companies.

 

[shrapnel_indie]

Google should have known this change would A) be discovered and B) rankle people who care about their privacy.

People who care about privacy probably shouldn't be using a browser from one of the largest data-mining and user-profiling advertisement companies.

Now to convince corporate America.