Since its launch in 2008, Google Chrome has grown exponentially to become the most popular web browser, accounting for more than 60 percent market share on both desktop and mobile. Which is why when Google alters its regular behaviour, it can have significant repercussions, intentional or otherwise. The change, this time, concerns
Chrome sync, a feature that lets you login to your Google account to access browser bookmarks, history, passwords, and other settings from Chrome on any device (providing you are logged in, of course). However in a sneaky turn of events, included in Google's biggest update to Chrome in 10 years (version 69) was a auto-login feature that automatically logs you into the browser as soon as you use it to sign in to a Google property. While this implicit sign-in without "consent" has raised
privacy concerns, Chrome engineer Adrienne Porter Felt
responded on Twitter that the new icon reflecting your profile picture is nothing but a visible confirmation that you are signed into Google, and that in order to activate the "sync," it requires an extra consent step. Google further assuaged privacy-conscious Chrome users in a
policy update: "On desktop versions of Chrome, signing into or out of any Google web service (e.g. google.com) signs you into or out of Chrome. Sync is only enabled if you choose."
Update on Sept. 26: Google has been forced to give users more control over how the auto-login feature works after security experts criticised the search giant for automatically signing Chrome users into their accounts when they log in to a Google service. In a blog post titled "
Product updates based on your feedback," Chrome product manager Zach Koch responded to the criticism, adding it will make clear the new behaviour in the next release arriving mid-October and update their UIs "to better communicate a user's sync state," something Matthew Green, security expert and professor at John Hopkins University, objected to, calling it a "dark pattern."
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