I'm still against this Chrome change for the same reasons, but I would hope other libraries do the same thing as we did. From my experience library tech people are usually really privacy focused.
In my experience, 9 out of 10 libraries, copy shops and internet cafés don't do this [properly].
As a public entity we had a mandate to protect user information and make sure it wasn't stored by us or accessible by others. This applied across the organisation from what books someone checked out to what websites they visited.
Maybe this was just more of a thing in Canada or even Alberta but the concept was definitely agreed upon with other libraries and people in the system I was in contact with. I have read other articles and such from American libraries about protecting information so I assumed it was more widespread.
Before, if you were logged into both Chrome and Gmail, you could log out of one and forget to log out of the other. Now, logging out of a Google site also logs you out of Chrome.
> Since the sync button no longer requires a password this means someone can log in at a library to check their email, walk away, and someone else can step up, hit the sync button, and steal all of their information.
If you have access to someone's email account, you can already steal quite a lot of information.
First off, since it applies to people logged out of Chrome and it forces them to log in it increases, not decreases, the chances of someone accidentally leaving their account available to others on the machine. Since the sync button no longer requires a password this means someone can log in at a library to check their email, walk away, and someone else can step up, hit the sync button, and steal all of their information.
They've just made people less secure, not more.
But lets take your argument and assume it's right. You could apply the same logic to every website on the internet- Amazon, people's bank accounts, phone companies, etc. Google is therefore abusing their status as the browser developer to give themselves special functionality that other websites can't give. This should open them up to a variety of antitrust actions (particularly in the EU).
At the end of the day this could have been done by letting people opt-in to the login. Add a button on the google login sites that say "log into browser as well" and let the people who want it click it.