>I've never once signed into chrome in my life (on purpose). I don't want anything synced between browsers, I like to try and limit what gets kept in the cloud, and with this change they've simply just taken the option away from the user.

At the jobs I've been in since browser syncing became a thing, where there were internal web tools, there has been an explicit policy against enabling it, out of security concerns. Regardless of how good the security might be at Google or Firefox etc. around their syncing stuff, if the content isn't there, it can't be compromised.

I'm not sure you're in the minority. People like to say that but sometimes that just seems like a currently popular rhetoric.

What is (or was) the difference between signing in to Gmail in the browser, vs signing in to the browser without sync?

(You might feel that this is a tipping point but it's still not a GDPR issue as far as I can tell.)

The difference for me is that, previously I knew I was multiple difficult steps away from having my browsing data uploaded to Google servers. That provided me a level of comfort that doesn't exist anymore. With the new method I'm one misclick away from giving everything to Google. Add on to this, Chrome has been increasingly pushy with its sign in prompts. There's no reason to think it won't eventually be equally pushy with its sync prompts.

For one thing they have completely different privacy policies. By signing into the chrome they are automatically forcing people to accept the privacy policy that is far less private than the when people aren't signed in.

This doesn't seem to be turning on Chrome Sync, so users aren't being forced into any privacy policy:

https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1044109898013765632

Read the actual privacy policy, not the tweet talking about it. Primary sources are always best.

> The personal information that Chrome stores won't be sent to Google unless you choose to store that data in your Google Account by signing in to Chrome.

That doesn't say "unless you enable sync", it says it changes "by signing in to Chrome". Since they're now forcing you to sign into chrome without your consent they are also forcing you to accept that they can send your data to their services without needing any additional permissions from you.

Literally the next sentence after the one you quoted is:

> Signing in enables Chrome’s synchronization feature.

This is no longer true, so it seems most likely that that entire paragraph is simply out of date.

Thanks, this is the first comment on the issue that actually made sense to me.

What is the service?