[grecy]

> There's no free lunch.

Of course there is. No sign-in at all.

My question should have been: Why do I have to sign in?

[dbaupp]

Presumably for keep track of statistics reliably.

[eblume]

Why not use a cookie, or html5 storage? Is security really a concern here?

[CodeCube]

because then they can't run reports across all users/languages. This is an awesome dataset that (I hope) they are collecting for language designers.

[bhrgunatha]

Why not? How does cookie storage of information about your progress prevent those reports?

Presumably they are storing that information in their back-end somewhere.

[CodeCube]

I don't know about you, but I have a windows desktop, a windows laptop, and a macbook pro that I regularly work from in different contexts. I much prefer cloud services that store my account information, and let me log in from whatever computer I want ... local storage would remove that benefit for users like me who don't really care that they're using my google login ;)