
Disable Google Chrome Sign In and Sync - fomojola
https://blog.ideasynthesis.com/2018/09/24/Disable-Google-Chrome-Sign-In-and-Sync/
======
jasonkester
Keep in mind that while everybody here is all outraged about this, nobody else
is. Because the experience is so nice.

It's the reason why I can search for "prefecture Melun" on my laptop, then
jump in the car, open up maps on my phone, Start typing "1" and watch it
suggest "12 rue de Gambas, Melun 77320", which happens to be the address of
the Melun prefecture.

That sort of thing happens for me every day, and i think it's kinda cool.
Google knows this stuff about my life and will suggest it at useful times. If
I open maps on the day I have a flight, ferry, or hotel reservation, it'll
just assume I want to navigate there (because it read one of my emails) and
suggest it for me.

So yeah, I guess I should be outraged and worry that they'll start targeting
me for ads or ratting me out to the NSA or something. But thus far they
haven't.

It's just that they can offer all this cool stuff if they connect your
devices. And in 2018 that involves using a database. Personally, that does not
concern me all that much.

~~~
reacharavindh
The day is not that far, when you look to buy say car insurance, and you get
$XYZ as a quote. Your ur friend gets $ABC where $ABC <<< $XYZ. Why? because
the profile that all these corporation built on you seems to suggest you have
the character profile of a 19 year old.

Is there a way you could prevent this? Yes, if you care about privacy and not
let someone build that database in the first place.

It's not only/always the NSA that we need to worry about.. You can already see
this in some sense. A flight ticket could cost more if you look for it using a
Mac instead of a PC. The road to creepy data mess is not that far.

~~~
savanaly
Information about what you're willing to pay isn't sufficient to lead to you
paying a higher price, like in your example. There has to be no competition in
the given market (probably not the case in your particular example-- car
insurance).

~~~
trendia
This is the exact opposite of what economics would predict. If you have a
greater risk than your friend, then you will pay more because your expected
risk is higher. In perfect competition, your rate would be equal to your
expected return (that is, the premiums would match the expected payout).

So, if an insurer can identify that you have a greater risk than your friend,
in perfect competition you would pay a higher rate. No insurer with perfect
knowledge of risk would allow you to pay _less_ than that, because they’re
expected return would be negative.

~~~
savanaly
I was assuming they were concerned about you being charged more than the cost
of providing the insurance. If the supposed dystopia is indeed merely the
reality where everyone gets charged the cost of providing the service I have
to ask how exactly you think things work right now.

------
newscracker
Thanks, but no thanks. Ditch Chrome and don’t worry about ugly hacks to
remember or bookmark or ask about in the future when they no longer work.

Life is too short to put up with such nonsense. There are better alternatives
[1] available.

P.S.: When you uninstall Chrome on certain platforms, it’ll open your default
browser and direct you to a feedback page. Be honest and tell them why, and
that you wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.

[1]: [https://www.firefox.com](https://www.firefox.com)

~~~
reacharavindh
I'll add one more to your side note.

Please tell your particularly non technical friends and relatives to avoid
Google like plague if they care about privacy. Show them how - give a link to
Firefox, Privacy badger.

A relative of mine who paid $7/month for a VPN service because he cared about
his privacy from ISP, but was using Google Chrome and Gmail for sensitive
personal Email. Fewer people from the non-engineering world know/understand
what we assume is common sense. When you get a chance please don't hesitate to
tell people of better choices.

~~~
dylan604
>Please tell your particularly non technical friends and relatives to avoid
Google like plague

For anyone that has never had a conversation like this, you really have to be
careful with this and pick your battles wisely. Some people are so non-
technical, that they will not understand what you are explaining to them, or
why you are even bothering them. You will be perceived as a tinfoil hat
wearing conspiracy theorist. Some people will understand what you are
explaining and might even understand your stance, but ultimately will still
continue in their ways because it's so much easier and convenient.

What ever you do, don't be judgemental about their decision. You will only
make them less interested. Start slowly. It can be overwhelming how fubar'd
the web experience has become.

~~~
radmuzom
Exactly. I regularly argue about this with my colleagues who are all mostly
trained statisticians with some programming experience. Generally, what
happens is that people are in awe of the "innovation" coming from Google and
my protests are generally laughed off.

~~~
pmontra
There are things that can be explained but can be understood only by direct
experience. This is one of them. They'll eventually get burned by their faith
in Google and suddenly they'll understand.

~~~
newscracker
Latching on to GP's context, statistically speaking, most people don't see
these issues themselves. So they don't care if one in a million or even one in
a hundred might get affected. As long as they (or their close ones) haven't
experienced it, it doesn't exist and doesn't matter. It's exhausting to deal
with such people, and most of the general public are this way.

------
breakingcups
There's a great way to disable this and many other user-hostile features by
going to [https://www.mozilla.org/](https://www.mozilla.org/) and downloading
Firefox. Suddenly, you are no longer fighting your browser.

~~~
endymi0n
While you're completely on the mark with this, I noticed that Google pulls the
new Microsoft now that it has almost a quasi monopoly on the desktop: Most of
the new, complex UIs by Google services (read: GCP Cloud Console, all of
Google Marketing Platform) are slowing my Firefox to a grinding halt, often
times even crashing the tab.

No problems in Chrome whatsoever. It's the only thing I'm using Chrome for
these days and I can't help shake the same ugly feeling than when I was forced
using Internet Explorer for government websites purely because of their
ActiveX plugins back in the days.

~~~
c16
I've noticed this also. Gmail or anything by Google within Firefox is painful.
Very very painful.

~~~
kannanvijayan
Just a heads up, but we are actively working on improving the situation here,
and should have releases coming out that steadily and progressively improves
the experience on this front. It is an area of major focus after the initial
Quantum Flow effort, and we have technical fixes in many places in the
pipeline to address this.

(I work on the Javascript engine in Firefox, and improving our story here is
one of my personal top priorities, as well as an organizational priority).

~~~
cptskippy
Are you saying that performance issues on Google properties are a bug in
Firefox? The other posters were implying the issue was Google doing things to
intentionally slow down performance in Firefox.

~~~
kannanvijayan
I'm not about to speak to the intent of programmers I haven't interacted with
heavily. In these sorts of charged conversations there is often an impulse to
make issues about "this" or "that" exclusively. I find it useful to avoid that
impulse entirely and instead focus on what I can do to make things better.

~~~
cptskippy
Well then let me restate my question. Are there regressions in Firefox that
hinder performance on Google properties?

------
bigiain
While it's interesting to see ways to inhibit Chrome's new behaviour, getting
into a privacy fight with your browser supplier seems to be a losing
strategy...

~~~
ashleyn
Yes, it's only a matter of time until Chrome removes this flag, just like they
removed developer support for disabling the autofill in web forms.

~~~
Semaphor
Oh wow, so that is why I had so many problems recently with using forms that
supplied some kind of autofill themselves.

I wondered why that problem didn't happen with FF (which I switched to).

------
lioeters
I was surprised and angered by the sudden appearance of this automatic sign-in
and sync. Between the time that it was activated silently and when I disabled
it, I have a nagging suspicion that Google hoovered up my browsing history,
bookmarks, passwords, etc. in the guise of "sync". While I couldn't find any
evidence, whatever little trust I had left in Chrome is now gone.

~~~
flipp3r
> I have a nagging suspicion that Google hoovered up my browsing history,
> bookmarks, passwords, etc. in the guise of "sync".

It does save some state even when you erase all your history. You can log into
GMail, then go to your history and click to erase all history, after which the
history settings page will scroll down (to hide the fact you're still logged
into this sync thing?), and then when you go to GMail you're logged in again,
effectively making Google bypass you clearing your cookies.

------
netwanderer2
Google should be very careful with these aggressive tactics. They are quickly
losing many users. There are other options available nowadays, including
browser like Brave. I personally have switched back to Firefox. I still like
Google but they are falling into the same old trap of not listening to their
users. The moment they let that escalated and there are other viable options
then the game is over.

~~~
xvector
> They are quickly losing many users.

While I'd also like to think this, the reality is that any number of users
they've lost would be negligible at best.

~~~
netwanderer2
For now yes, but the tech world has showed us similar lessons before. I bet
Blackberry and Nokia executives said the same thing when Apple introduced the
first iPhone. MySpace was very confident when they deemed Facebook number of
users was negligible as well. Unfortunately privacy issues are only getting
bigger in the future. That's why I said Google should be very careful not to
tread down the same path. Only those who learned lessons from the past will
survive. I love Google so I hope they won't get too comfortable with data
mining activities and lose track of keeping their users who are the real data
sources.

------
thinkingemote
Linux users.

Put:

    
    
      {
      "SyncDisabled": true,
      "RestrictSigninToPattern": ".*@example.com"
      }
    

in a file called disable_sync.json (for example)

and place in the following location:

Chrome: /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/disable_sync.json

Chromium: /etc/chromium-browser/policies/managed/disable_sync.json

~~~
pmontra
It worked on Chrome Version 69.0.3497.100 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Ubuntu
16.04 but it didn't work with Chromium Version 69.0.3497.81 (Official Build)

Chromium kept signing me into my Google account.

~~~
thinkingemote
You'll need to close down and restart Chromium after each change I think for
these. Some policies don't require restarts.

------
gardaani
If I go to [https://groups.google.com](https://groups.google.com) using my
Android phone and Chrome 69 and press the sign out link, it won't sign me out.
Next time I go to groups.google.com, I'm still logged in. What is the point
showing the sign out link if it doesn't do anything? Thanks Google.

Firefox on Android properly signs me out.

One more reason why I don't use Android as my primary phone. I just don't
trust Google.

~~~
techntoke
I heard Firefox OS is awesome.

------
h2onock
I don’t understand why people are complaining about this. If you’re concerned
about privacy then why would you even use a Google product in the first place?
There are other options.

~~~
isolli
Chrome has become the de facto standard browser. I regularly run into websites
that don't work (or don't work well) in Firefox.

~~~
lmedinas
Do yourself and the community a favor and when you see a website that doesn't
work well make the Firefox Team aware of it[1]. They have a dedicated Team to
check those issues.

1-
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility#Contact_Us](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Compatibility#Contact_Us)

~~~
isolli
Thanks for the tip!

------
kipdotcom
To disable this feature (at least for chrome 69, not sure if it will change),
go to account-consistency: chrome://flags/#account-consistency and select
disable.

~~~
prdonahue
This no longer works in Chrome Canary (71).

EDIT: to be clear you can _configure_ the setting, but it's not respected
anymore.

Former Chrome engineer confirming my report here:
[https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1043861647247515649](https://twitter.com/ericlaw/status/1043861647247515649).

~~~
torstenvl
This is deeply troubling.

------
emodendroket
What's the point of inconveniencing yourself in all these ways when there are
fifty other ways people can track all your browsing activity anyway? It just
doesn't seem worth the trouble.

------
LiterallyDoge
I think the biggest point here is one of respect to the customer. The fact
that I lost all of my settings when I simply logged out my persona is clearly
disrespectful of the customer. With so many good options, why use Google?

------
LeoNatan25
> As much as I might like Chrome (and Google)

Why would you? Brokering data in a borderline illegal or immoral way is their
business model.

------
ausjke
Further convinced to go back to FF, darn it after an update and a reboot one
hour ago, ctrl+space no longer works with chrome(which worked in the last few
years) but it works the same way with anything else, yesterday it's that
youtube brought my PC to grinding halt when it's used with crhome(firefox
works fine), what's going on Google???

------
gepeto42
I found that the easiest way to do it on Mac is to download the Chrome
Enterprise bundle, edit the .plist and convert it to a profile with
McxToProfile, to get something like this:

[https://twitter.com/gepeto42/status/1043587638568079360](https://twitter.com/gepeto42/status/1043587638568079360)

~~~
driverdan
The easiest way is to switch to another browser.

------
d1zzy
Oh wow, so if you just log in into a Google Account it automatically activates
Google Sync without any prompts and starts uploading browser history data and
other no-Google properties related browser data? That's pretty nasty. I can
understand that for most people this feature is very useful and it's fine to
have it, just not fine to enable it by default without even a prompt or
something asking users if they want to enable it (say the first time it
detects a login to a Google property). Especially with all the governmental
focus on Google right now I'm surprised this would get rolled out worldwide.

I never noticed it but it seems it's not being used when using incognito mode
(I only browse in private mode, either Chrome or Firefox) so I wasn't aware
such a thing is happening in the normal browser mode...

~~~
teddyfrozevelt
> if you just log in into a Google Account it automatically activates Google
> Sync without any prompts and starts uploading browser history data and other
> no-Google properties related browser data?

No, it does not.

[https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1044110733108101120](https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1044110733108101120)

------
mikl
Great, another creepy thing in Chrome we have to disable. Like Google Software
Update wasn't already annoying enough.

If I wasn't a web developer, and needed to use Chrome for testing, I'd have
uninstalled that creepy quasi-spyware long ago.

~~~
inetknght
Why is Chrome "needed"? I would imagine merely having a standards-compliant
browser is the only thing you need?

In which case, why not Firefox?

~~~
umanwizard
In practice it’s not unusual for behavior to differ between chrome and
Firefox.

~~~
sixothree
Especially when google has been known to program their sites in a way that
favors their browser..

------
g8oz
For Windows and Mac Chromium builds without Google Sync I recommend:
[https://chromium.woolyss.com/](https://chromium.woolyss.com/) From the site:
"Welcome on this auto-updated website to easily download latest stable version
or good build of Chromium web browser. All is free and open-source."

Don't download the default installer. Instead scroll to the build that says
"No Sync".

Chromium of course is the Google sponsored open source project that Chrome is
based on. It has the dev tools of Chrome which I prefer to those of Firefox.

------
Lazeb
Once again another reminder that the need for open source alternatives with
minimal to no logging is shown to be a greater necessity in an age where these
companies know us better than the government. We can continue to pretend these
companies are non-partisan and won't use the data collected for political
influence, everyone here is _obviously_ impervious to such influences, but the
bigger concern is its influence on public perception.

~~~
katslime
I think people would rather trade their security for convenience, which in the
first place is why Chrome is so popular, with its inbuilt tie-in to Google
services. Sure, you could provide an open-source browser that's security
focused, but what makes it compelling to the end-user to switch away from
Chrome? I don't think many laymen particularly care about this situation.

------
Havoc
So long and thanks for all the fish google

------
whyagaindavid
If you are on linux please see:
[https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/ChromeWalkingAw...](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/ChromeWalkingAway?showcomments#comments)

------
jasonjayr
If they remove the flag, can you disable the service by black-holing an IP,
URL, or DNS entry?

~~~
RobertRoberts
I would also like to know if there is some kind of network blocking that could
be employed. But likely everything goes through google.com ...

------
talkingtab
I tried to install Chromium but don't know how to install my extensions. So
the this seems like the best solution for now although I am working to
rehabilitate Firefox.

Thank you for doing this.

~~~
techntoke
You install extensions the same way with Chromium. I don't understand how this
could be hard to figure out.

~~~
alyandon
It can be more difficult than you might think.

About a year ago I installed the chromium package provided by Debian and went
to install my favorite set of extensions and kept getting a weird error about
not being allowed to install them. Turns out that the Debian package
maintainer had decided to build Chromium with a patch that disabled installing
extensions unless you pass in a flag on the command line to chromium to re-
enable the feature. I found this out not because it was properly documented
but instead from a bug report on the Debian bug tracker.

Of course, FireFox on Debian hasn't been similarly modified to disallow
installing extensions from AMO.

~~~
techntoke
Sounds like poor packaging from Debian. I haven't had any issues on Arch with
the following package:

[https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-
bin/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi-bin/)

------
xfitm3
You can set a strong sync password in Chrome. Of course, your Google search
history etc is still available to other apps.

------
s3r3nity
I don't think it's coincidental that this controversy arose at the same time
Google is pushing their new "Signals" product in Google Analytics, which
leverages customer sign-in data?

(Just noticed this today.)

[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7532985?hl=en&ut...](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7532985?hl=en&utm_id=ad&authuser=1)

------
throw7
Is this true for chromium also?

~~~
dredmorbius
Yes.

------
zoltaan
Best way of disabling Google Chrome sign in and sync: Uninstall Chrome.

------
imchillyb
NSLs are a bitch.

------
paulie_a
Disable the most useful features in chrome. No thanks.

------
Sistrixirri
Well, Google is being Google once again.

