There are two kinds of people in the world: (i) the kind who would want all their logins, passwords, cookies, and browsing history to be transmitted to Google's servers for reasons of "convenience" and (ii) everyone else.
If you fall into (ii) you probably don't care much about the recent flap where Google users are involuntarily "logged in" to their Chrome browsers. (Who knew you could even "log in" to a browser?) This occurs whenever users log into a Google "product" such as gmail. The reason for all this logging in is ostensibly so the users' data can be "synchronized" among the Google servers and all instances of Chrome they might be running.
If you fall into category (i) you are either very concerned about this privacy-shredding dark pattern or, you feel it's simply a matter of Google needing to have better documentation.
Day: September 28, 2018
amazon vs vpn recap
A reader characterized some recent posts here on Amazon blocking VPNs as "ranting." Just so we're clear, it's actually kind of a hopeful development that Amazon is violating its own "customer convenience is paramount" credo by putting up roadblocks to sign-in: it suggests its business model is challenged by user privacy concerns.
The true rants were aimed at a VPN company that excused its failure to get past the Amazon firewall on the basis of Amazon's need for security. Poor Jeff, everyone should be helping him to be a better monopolist.