| That is an extremely narrow example that ignores many other scenarios, some of them privacy related and some of them functionality related. But I'll bite. In the scenario you just described, can't Alice still just look at her local history and get all of the same information? I just tested -- local history is accessible across accounts in Chrome 69. So this change doesn't actually protect people who are sharing computers -- a private browsing session is what protects them. And this change doesn't make private browsing any easier. Also in this scenario, if Bob isn't checking his email or something, he's very unlikely to go log Alice out of her account. So the extremely minor privacy boost that doesn't actually exist because all of Bob's history is still stored locally will still only happen if both Alice and Bob use Gmail. Which makes it sound like this entire feature was the brainchild of some executive who genuinely can't comprehend someone borrowing a computer and not immediately signing into Gmail. A much better solution to the problem you're describing above would be to draw more attention to private browsing sessions in the UX, or to just have some kind of notification when the user signs out of Gmail. Heck, you could have the same exact feature, except drop the auto-login part and only have the auto-logout. That would still be a useless feature because of the reasons above, but it would get rid of the vast majority of the privacy concerns the tech community is currently raising. Auto-login is not necessary to fix the problem you're talking about. |