Google has made a major change to the way the program works tourς Chrome, μια κίνηση που η company did not advertise to its users and which has serious implications for privacy.
According to several reports [ 1, 2, 3], starting with Chrome 69, each time an application user visits a Google-owned Web site, the browser logs the user's Google ID into Chrome Sync.
Sync allows users to link to their Google Chrome accounts to upload and sync (optionally) local browser data (history, passwords, bookmarks, and so on) to Google's servers.
Sync has been around in Chrome for many years, but until now the system only worked if you logged in to a Google Account. This allowed users to browse the web while logged in to a Google Account (Gmail, YouTube) but did not upload Chrome browsing data to Google servers, data that is apparently linked to their accounts.
With the latest revelations about the new auto-login mechanism, too many users are not at all happy with the insidious modification that allows Google to link each person's traffic to a particular browser and a device with higher precision.
This practice proved to be wrong, as Google technicians clarified in Twitter that this automatic sign-in feature does not start the local data synchronization process on Google's servers but requires a user click.
Furthermore, they also revealed that the reason why this mechanism was added was for reasons protectionof private life. Chrome engineers stated that the auto-login mechanism was added to the browser because of shared computers – browsers.
When one or more users use the same Chrome browser, the data from these users could be sent by mistake to another person's Google account
However, despite the logic behind this move, users are still unhappy because they no longer have the option of deciding when to log in to their browser and secondly why Google did not say anything about the new feature.
Google Chrome 69 was released on September 5, about two weeks ago, and no one knew what the program did in the background.
Matthew Green, a well-known expert encryptionand professor at Johns Hopkins University, reported in a publication on his blog that Google has redesigned the Sync account interface in such a way that it is no longer clear to users that they are logged in or what they need to push to start synchronization.
He calls this change "dark pattern", A term we have described in older publications.
In its current form, the Sync account interface is actually misleading and a user can accidentally click on all of his browser's data on Google.
Chrome 69 was a major release with many new features, such as a new user interface. Some claim that Google hid this change in the version of Chrome 69, hoping that no one would see it among all the features of the new version, and so it took more than two weeks for Google friends to detect the behavior.
However, the influence of a few hot Twitter posts has helped push things forward on Google's HQ and Chrome technicians have announced that Google will update Chrome's Privacy Policy to reflect the new Chrome mode.
Of course this policy update can satisfy some lawyers but does not address the issue. Google has modified a Chrome feature without informing users, and this modification can lead to serious privacy violations.
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