> If the HN backlash is anything to go by, a lot of people see it the same way as you (me included).

HN isn't representative of most users of Chrome. I doubt that we qualify as "a lot" to Google. An extremely vocal minority, at best.

you're a techie i'm guessing? How many of your friends/family ask for tech support/advice? There's a serious multiplier effect at work. I'm a high school IT teacher. I influence approx 600 students per year. We now cover online privacy and I will be setting assignments that ask students to investigate and make reasoned arguments about the impact of Google's dominance on their privacy.

Once you annoy enough of the tech literate, word will start to spread. Slowly, then quickly. How do you think Chrome got its foothold to begin with?

I won't deny that the tech crowd can influence things, but it's become quite hard for regular users to quit the whole Google panoply of services and tech products. Mail, browser, maps, dns, search, etc... It isn't painless and easy to abandon all of this and I have doubts even tech-savvy influencers can counter it at this point, only by word of mouth.

And about how Chrome got a foothold in the first place, I distinctly remember Google agressively advertising their own product on their search engine page, and bundling the binary with everything under the sun (Adobe Reader, anti-virus, etc...). Every time you installed software, there was a good chance Chrome was included with it. Tech influencers had their part in the success of Chrome, but it definitely wasn't the only factor, or maybe even the most important one.

anecdotal, but i don't know anyone outside of HN who actually thought this was a bad idea. on the contrary, most of my coworkers that use shared pcs praised logging in to both the browser and other google services as it helps them improve their productivity.