Nobody really cares outside this tech bubble. There won't be a PR fiasco, because it's hard to explain why it's bad for a non techie end user.
"Google simplifies the login experience in Chrome", is essentially what's happening here and it's far from obvious how to sell it as a doomsday scenario as I read the mood correctly of many HN users.
Maybe I'm just crazy, but if I didn't like Google Chrome (or if I was a privacy hawk), I wouldn't use Google products. Why do so many people complain about "privacy" and still use Google products?
The people who think they can speak for their parents or the less technically inclined are being too presumptuous in my opinion. YOU may have a problem with these methods, but not everyone does. Heck, there's people as technical as you that still don't have a problem with it.
Super technical person who doesn't care, reporting in.
But I also wish we lived in a utopian society where all information, people, companies, govt. was public and there was no weird illusion of privacy that everyone is clamoring for.
I long accepted privacy on the internet doesn't exist, and mostly privacy off the internet is minimal, especially with all the technology around. If you want privacy, you need to live like the Amish.
So, I just accepted it, and now don't care about privacy breaches, giving all my data to google. I willingly give more data to google so they can make my life easier.
I get hopefully 100 years on this planet, I am not going to worry about privacy when I got better things to use my limited time and energy on.
Even inside of this tech bubble there are people like me that think this change is fine the way it is and that it's actually a good idea for convenience. The vast majority of people are using Chrome to go to Google websites using their Google account and having one less step to sign in to Chrome Sync is just a good thing from a usability perspective.
Everything has an adoption curve, when Chrome launched why would the average user use it? But eventually it went through the adoption curve and even with Google aggressive nagging too time to gain mainstream traction.
The same thing is happening with surveillance and spyware and the self serving 'users don't care' that many tech apologists use to distract from their stalking and lack of ethics is already out of touch and disconnected from increasing mainstream awareness and disgust with surveillance.
Just yesterday Craig Newmark announced a $20 million donation to a new publication modelled on propublica to examine tech surveillance. It's only a matter of time before surveillance implementors and apologists begin to look like the sellouts that they are in the public eye.
For people already logging into Chrome, perhaps.
For people who have chosen to not sign into chrome, this is a breach of privacy and of trust. Without warning, we've been force-signed-in with no clear way to disable this setting.
Agreed, this will be forgotten about even by tech power users in under a week. Google needs to take the initial PR blow and then it will be over. The only thing that will put pressure on Google is EU with GDPR.
I left ProtonMail because it was slow and lacking features. Their reason for their snail pace of feature releases seems to be "we put security first".
Edit: Also, with ProtonMail as a paying customer, by default my signature was set to "Sent from ProtonMail". How cheesy. I'm paying for their service, they shouldn't be using me to advertise.
for all you geniuses downvoting my tldr commment: by far the 2 most popular suggested alternatives from the thread were fastmail and protonmail. fastmail costs money. for us elite hacker types its no biggy but does your mom pay for email? its not a fair competitor when 99% of people think email should just be free. protonmail is free but limits how many emails you can send and caps you at 500MB. also sign up and then try signing up for facebook. better get your ID ready...
edit: to be clear i'm not knocking either option. im just supporting my original point -- that google's recent actions do not threaten its email dominance
I pay for a Posteo account and am quite satisfied with it. The webmail is just your standard run-of-the-mill webmail without any fancy features like Google Inbox, but since IMAP is supported, you can just put whatever frontend you like in front of it.
i dont know why your comment is being downvoted instead of being replied to. its a valid comment. sadly im seeing this all the time now -- comments being downvoted just because other users disagree. if you disagree and have a valid argument, make the argument... i digress. i pine for when hn was more intelligent
