Ta-da, no more spyware.

You could point out reasons why this isn't the same thing, but you'd be missing the point. I, as an individual, can't fully assess the privacy impact of every single piece of technology I use, and what seems to be a benign feature backed by a corporation I trust could be anything but.

That being the case, we need to adopt certain heuristics to help defend our privacy. Granting as few permissions as possible for applications we use, and avoiding using a single identity across all of our devices is a good way to mitigate that risk.

Are you an individual that is willing to reduce your privacy a bit for added convenience? That's perfectly fine. But the ethical thing for Google to do would be to make this an opt-in feature, rather than an opt-out. The fact that they made this browser/Google Account sync the default was no accident. They want to gather more data on their users, and know if their users were stopped and prompted to think about whether or not they actually wanted this convenience, they would have less participating users. So they've made the unethical choice, and made this an opt-out feature.

Personally having my entire browsing history linked to my name and sent off to a company for analysis and profit is a concern, and this is a deal breaker for me. As such I will no longer be using Chrome as my default browser.

Specially when it's Google. They are super creepy and facilitators of a future where users have zero privacy but don't have the intelligence to care about it.

To me it's obvious, to others it's not. Just look at Google usage. They are absolutely creepy.

2. Google can say >99% of users "prefer" the new setting.

3. Tighten the lock-in.

Historically, the great Google products are made from scratch (or bought early) and stand by themselves. Their not-so-good products or features are the result of some elaborate corporate thinking that comes out under phrases like "Identity consistency between browser and cookie jar".

So, while they (may) think it tightens the lock-in, it (may) actually end up doing the opposite and be a disservice to everyone.

Gmail and Calendar already share the same login. Is that hurting anyone?

Even ignoring the (many) privacy implications, this causes problems for syncing across devices. Lets say I share a computer with my partner, but we have separate phones. Should I need to check which Gmail account is logged in before bookmarking something? Why can't we share a Chrome profile across those 3 devices while still maintaining separate Gmail accounts?

Why would they use the same browser logon. Sure they might use the same be, sure, they might even not use a different user account on the computer, but your are suggesting that they would use the same Google account to log into the browser yet different Google Accounts to log into Google.

That seems improbable, and likely to have unintended privacy implication that account consistency would mitigate rather than exacerbate.

The privacy implications here are in regards to stuff like Google stripping search terms off of urls from competing services. Caring about that doesn't mean you will necessarily care about hiding search history from your partner. Even with syncing passwords -- both of my parents know how to log into each other's Gmail accounts. Anecdotally, that is relatively common for older generations; sometimes they'll even ask each other to check their email if a computer isn't nearby.

If you have sync turned on in that scenario, you are going to end up with bookmarks and passwords that randomly disappear depending on who was logged into what when they were added.

And sure, you can get around that by just not using sync. The privacy implications are still worse in that situation, because you no longer have a choice not to log into Chrome. But even if you don't care about that, it still seems like a strict downgrade in functionality. You lose the ability to sync bookmarks between computers and you lose the ability to easily share logins.

The response to, "hey, you made this feature less useful!" probably shouldn't be, "well, but you won't notice if you just stop using it." It's hard to make that sound like an upgrade.

Suppose I and my partner want to be able to bookmark something and have it show up on both of our phones. Is there a way to do that without sharing a Gmail account? That seems like a pretty common use case to me that was pretty easy to do before Chrome tied them together.

On Firefox, that use case would be trivial. You just sign all your browsers into one account and then use the web normally like you've always done.

No, my suggestion was to create separate user accounts on the shared computer for each person--i.e., each person logs in to the computer with their own user account. That would make all of the website logins separate for each user, without anyone having to switch profiles in their browser.

However, I apparently misunderstood your problem; you don't want everything separate, you just want gmail separate while still sharing Chrome profiles. You're right that my suggestion won't solve that problem.

It's actually hurting me: I'd like to be able to sign into YouTube on an untrusted device without signing into Gmail at the same time.

While I'm not signed into the browser, it has lifted my Google Account profile image into the browser, so it's still doing some sort of "consistency". It's clear the browser still knows my Google Account.

Image: https://imgur.com/hrEwPqX.png (Note, I confirmed that the about:flag "Identity consistency..." is set to Disabled before/after this screenshot again.)

I continue to be thrilled that I moved back to Firefox around Quantum.