Comment by srtjstjsj
8 years ago
Why is it harmful to log in once to both apps that use the same account in the same browser?
Gmail and Calendar already share the same login. Is that hurting anyone?
8 years ago
Why is it harmful to log in once to both apps that use the same account in the same browser?
Gmail and Calendar already share the same login. Is that hurting anyone?
Multiple users may use the same browser/devices but different Gmail accounts.
Even ignoring the (many) privacy implications, this causes problems for syncing across devices. Lets say I share a computer with my partner, but we have separate phones. Should I need to check which Gmail account is logged in before bookmarking something? Why can't we share a Chrome profile across those 3 devices while still maintaining separate Gmail accounts?
> Multiple users may use the same browser/devices but different Gmail accounts.
Why would they use the same browser logon. Sure they might use the same be, sure, they might even not use a different user account on the computer, but your are suggesting that they would use the same Google account to log into the browser yet different Google Accounts to log into Google.
That seems improbable, and likely to have unintended privacy implication that account consistency would mitigate rather than exacerbate.
My parents share computer accounts; heck, they even share bank accounts. It is not implausible to me that you'd want to have separate emails, but also want all of your bookmarks to sync across multiple devices regardless of who they belong to.
The privacy implications here are in regards to stuff like Google stripping search terms off of urls from competing services. Caring about that doesn't mean you will necessarily care about hiding search history from your partner. Even with syncing passwords -- both of my parents know how to log into each other's Gmail accounts. Anecdotally, that is relatively common for older generations; sometimes they'll even ask each other to check their email if a computer isn't nearby.
If you have sync turned on in that scenario, you are going to end up with bookmarks and passwords that randomly disappear depending on who was logged into what when they were added.
And sure, you can get around that by just not using sync. The privacy implications are still worse in that situation, because you no longer have a choice not to log into Chrome. But even if you don't care about that, it still seems like a strict downgrade in functionality. You lose the ability to sync bookmarks between computers and you lose the ability to easily share logins.
The response to, "hey, you made this feature less useful!" probably shouldn't be, "well, but you won't notice if you just stop using it." It's hard to make that sound like an upgrade.
The most likely approach there is not to "log into the browser" at all. I don't, I have separate profiles on every system.
If you share a computer with someone else, each of you should have your own user accounts. Then each user account will have its own profile data, including which accounts are logged in.
Not sure why you're being so harshly downvoted, Chromium and derivatives have pretty solid profile switching. Doing this would actually be less work than signing out/in to other accounts.
2 replies →
> Is that hurting anyone?
It's actually hurting me: I'd like to be able to sign into YouTube on an untrusted device without signing into Gmail at the same time.
why sign into an untrusted device in any way without two factor authentication and incognito mode enabled?
Because a lot of us have a work Gmail account and a personal Gmail account.
Sure, and this would just result in two separate profiles in Chrome.
I don't want to be switching between profiles. I want to be able to see my personal Gmail and my work Gmail, and only sync up my work profile. Or alternatively, I don't want to sync.