The issue with this line of thinking is that this change isn't really a privacy invasion. Account consistency didn't at all affect privacy. You still had to opt in to syncing, which did affect privacy.
I would be surprised if it didn't affect google's capacity to track you nominally.
When I flush all cookies from my browser session, and open a new session, I am a new user to google's various tracking mechanism. If I am an authenticated google user, then I am not.
I would agree that there was at least potentially an issue due to it re-logging you in. But I'll note that no one wrote a blog post about that. Someone just mentioned that on twitter after this was already a big "controversy".
In other words, you had half of HN claiming to be leaving Chrome over something they had no reason to believe had any privacy implications, and in reality, has either 0, or really close to 0, actual privacy implications.
I made a claim about HN being a small group in the grand scheme, and someone countered by claiming that most users didn't understand what was changing. But I think the funny thing is that the average user, who had the understanding that "literally nothing" was changing, would have been closer to the truth of the situation than the average HN commenter.
Not to say that the result of the hullabaloo was bad, I actually think this set of updates only improves things over where they are now, but its still a really strange sequence of events.
But if it re-logs you back in when you re-open the browser, it may be technically a different cookie, but it is a cookie with your real identity attached to it (as opposed to an anonymous cookie like if you started a fresh session on an older version of the browser). So practically, that has the same effect that if the cookie was never deleted.
The parent means, logging out and staying logged out of the browser, would have exactly the same behaviour as logging out of your Google Account would in Firefox.
The whole point of the feature was just that:
1. “are you logged into your Google Account from the perspective of Gmail et al” is now the thing the browser chrome itself reports; and
2. you now need to be logged into your Google Account in the cookies sense for Chrome sync to function; logging out of your Google Account turns off Chrome sync.
Before, people could be in a state where they have Chrome sync enabled with foo@gmail, but are not logged into foo@gmail from a cookies perspective, and are potentially even logged into bar@gmail.
This is the state that has been eliminated—now, the browser chrome’s login state reflects your Google Account web-cookie login state, because they’re one-and-the-same; and every method that logs you out of your Google account from a web-cookie perspective, also logs you out of Chrome (and vice-versa.)
Consider the privacy implications of someone who logs out of Gmail, but is still logged into Chrome sync as said Gmail user; and then lets someone else use the computer. That is what is no longer possible.
It’s a privacy improvement targeted at the people who expect “logging out” of their Google account to be one unilateral action that frees a computer of all artifacts related to their original logging-in. Which, until recently, wasn’t true: if you originally logged in by entering your credentials into the “new Chrome profile wizard” (where they set up the credential as both your synnc and web-cookie credential), and then logged out of one, it wouldn’t affect the other.
No, I mean you can log out of your Google account in the browser and it actually logs you out. Deleting your cookies does re-create a cookie (which is weird), but logging out in browser (I see it as "Exit Joshua" on Chrome on OSX) deletes Google cookies and doesn't recreate any.
It is difficult for me to assess the validity of this statement. I cannot tell if the behaviour is or is not a privacy invasion. What I can tell is that it is not in the direction of greater privacy. That it is not a feature I'd requested, want, or am comfortable with. And it's in line with multiple past trust violations.
That Google are announcing walking this back within days of release and publicity suggests some measure of the storms roiling the 'Plex presently.
>What I can tell is that it is not in the direction of greater privacy
For you, it may be a no-op, but for many users, it is a net increase in privacy (people who use multiple accounts or who use accounts on shared computers).
>That Google are announcing walking this back
Erm, sort of, I guess. There are some small changes.
What numbers, precisely, do you have on this? Because it sounds to me as if you're arguing from a position of ignorance.
There might be some benefit to the small number of users who 1) have multiple devices and 2) share one or more of those amongst several other people in the same account in ways that this Chrome feature ... might address. But this doesn't strike me as some overwhelmingly large use case.
The system for user separation on shared computers is called ... user accounts. Which every mainstream consumer operating system has supported for the past 17 years (Windows XP being the latecomer to this game.)
Otherwise, this is a broadening of Google's ever-expanding ingestion of user data, either directly or by way of one more (or an incremental series of) "small change". If I notice my enemy maneuvering me to his advantage, I counter that maneuver. In my case, it's meant uninstalling Chrome and Chromium from any systems on which that's possible.
(My much-regretted purchase some years ago of an Android tablet being the primary exception, though I'm resolved to not repeat that mistake, despite a dire lack of viable market options presently. Purism and Ubuntu may be nearing useful products.)
...small changes...
In the Universe in which I inhabit, Google specifically addressed user feedback and sign-in changes. I cannot find your characterisation of their announcement as accurate under any charitable interpretation.
