[bla2]

> But it brings users within an accidental click of sharing their bookmarks and browsing history with Google.

It's two clicks, you need to be really explicit about it. The first click opens a huge "You're about to turn on sync" dialog, where you have to click "Yes, I'm in" again.

I don't disagree with the general sentiment, but the article isn't factually correct. It's also by the same person who misunderstood the recent chrome changes and wrote a long blog post triggered by them misunderstanding what was going on (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gyny83/google-chr...).

[matthewdgreen]

Could you tell me what claims in my post were incorrect? So far nobody at Google has disputed them, just pointed out that they don’t activate sync (which my blog post already stipulates.)

[bla2]

"Google developers claim this will not actually start synchronizing your data to Google — yet"

It sounds like you got up in arms because you thought that chrome now auto-syncs when you sign in to gmail, and wrote the blog post draft. Then you learned that this isn't the case but you kept your arms up anyway, added that unsubstantiated "- yet" and hit "publish" anyway, despite nothing really having changed.

(Disclaimer 1: I used to work for google, so I'm likely biased to give them more benefit of doubt. Disclaimer 2: This is a shared HN account (the password isn't exactly hard to guess), so not all of its comments or posts are written by me.)

[matthewdgreen]

If you look up my Twitter account, you’ll see that I had a long discussion with multiple Chrome engineers days prior to writing the post, and there they explained the sync distinction to me. The post clearly explains the situation (mandatory login, but not sync) and articulates several reasons why I think it’s still an issue even if Google doesn’t auto-synchronize — a guarantee I don’t feel confident relying on in the future. In those various Twitter threads I also identified several problems with the Chrome privacy policy, which Google had to quickly update on a Sunday as a result.

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/10433312293267496...