Google retracted their decision after heavy user criticism

Sep 26, 2018 14:42 GMT  ·  By

Google will change some things around in Chrome 70 after strong critique from both regular users and security experts concerned about the privacy implications of the new auto sign-in feature and the inability to delete Google cookies when logged into the Google Account system.

Zach Koch, Chrome Product Manager, said in a blog post that "we’ve heard—and appreciate—your feedback. We’re going to make a few updates in the next release of Chrome (Version 70, released mid-October) to better communicate our changes and offer more control over the experience."

This is one of the few instances when Google listens to the feedback given by Chrome users, and it is a sign that Mountain View's opinion on the future of their web browser can be swayed if enough voices call them out when they go the wrong way,

After the release of Chrome 69, users noticed that once you log into one of Google's services like Gmail, the web browser will also automatically sign you into the Chrome account system.

One can toggle off the automatic Google login in Chrome 69 by going to chrome://flags/#account-consistency and disabling the "Identity consistency between browser and cookie jar" flag.

Google retracted their decision after the massive amount of negative feedback received from users expressing their privacy concerns

This was followed by the discovery of a weird mechanism which would not allow you to delete Google cookies when clearing all of Chrome's website data, with the cookies generated by Google-owned domains being removed and then immediately resurrected.

Google engineers told us that the immortal auth cookies were related to the fact that users were logged into Chrome and the browser was trying to keep them signed in even after deleting them. 

This is something that wouldn't have been needed if users would've been allowed to opt-in when being signed into Chrome, as the ones that would want to would be OK with the browser keeping them logged in.

Koch's blog post announced the removal of the two new Chrome 69 features described above, the ones that irked so many Google Chrome fans since this version was released, as well as an updated user interface to make the sign-in state more noticeable and if the data sync service is enabled. 

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