Note that I explicitly mentioned this as the one consideration that was mildly convincing:

>I think I've seen exactly one potentially compelling argument, which is that it may now be easier to accidentally enable syncing when you don't want to, since its a single click instead of entering a password.

Personally, though, (and I want to highlight that this is just my opinion as a person) I don't think it's a regression. But I can understand why others might disagree. From what I've read, the old behavior was that logging in enabled syncing by default. So accidentally logging in would immediately sync things.

I've certainly made the mistake of logging into the wrong account in the wrong chrome window, so I could absolutely see a user making the same mistake previously.

But even if you disagree, I think "you can synchronize by mistake, so they should add a confirmation dialogue" (which is a change I would support!) puts this firmly into the realm of imperfect UX and not an attack on privacy that should be totally rolled back.

And the aggravating (and potentially harmful) thing is that we can't even approach the discussion of "should we add a confirmation box", which would address the UX issue, if the accusation is that it's an attack on privacy. First we have to have this long tiring discussion where people throw around words like "Orwellian" and "GDPR" and we get to the reality that people are complaining about a whole host of not-really-harmful things, and that the one actually-maybe-harmful thing is a confirmation dialogue.

And yet as a employee of Google the question that you should be concerned with is how this impacts you. Given that GDPR was explicitly intended to punish big American companies for violating the privacy of Europeans, you should read the GDPR carefully from the point of view of, "Would the people who wrote this intend for my employer to get hit by my behavior?"

For a cautionary note, consider carefully how Microsoft got away with losing antitrust lawsuit after antitrust lawsuit and laughing about the consequences...until the EU decided to raise the stakes on them. And then read https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/27/the-largest-fines-dished-out... to remind yourself how the EU thinks of Google.

Now I personally am opposed to the EU approach. (The upcoming copyright laws are particularly worrisome to me.) But at some point Google is going to need to leave the EU, or else to follow EU law. I don't believe that Google is willing to exit the EU. In which case you should really be worried about parts of Google that are putting the whole company at risk by violating EU law. No matter what you, personally, think of said EU laws.