I don’t know what to make of the accusations re: Chrome logins in the revised antitrust complaint against Google, but I’m now really looking forward to learning more.
https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1452094513741189122
A few years back, Google activated a feature that would automatically log you into the Chrome browser anytime you logged into a Google site. This made it basically impossible to be logged out of Chrome if you used Google accounts.
The Chrome engineers said that they had to do this because users with multiple accounts were getting confused — apparently the idea that some people might not want Chrome to be logged in was not contemplated.
After a huge amount of blowback from the tech community (including this ranty Slate article I wrote), Google held firm. Their only concession was an optional switch in Settings to turn auto-login off. (Is that switch still there? Some say it’s gone now.) slate.com/technology/201…
I’m very torn about this because Chrome engineers I trust have insisted that this feature was genuinely well-intentioned even if it seems fishy as hell, and would appear to benefit Google quite a bit.
So now this specific feature is being called out in an antitrust complaint. Which either means there really was more to it, or the plaintiffs have no idea and are using this allegation to make Google look bad (which, gosh, it sure does.)
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