Like many of you reading this, you’re probably signed into a Google service when browsing the web — Google apps (G Suite), YouTube, Gmail, etc. The line between browser (Chrome) and your signed in services was clear before, and now it’s not.

Matthew Green, Cryptographer and Professor at Johns Hopkins University, writes on his personal blog:

What changed? A few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. From now on, every time you log into a Google property (for example, Gmail), Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you. It’ll do this without asking, or even explicitly notifying you. However, and this is important: Google developers claim this will not actually start synchronizing your data to Google — yet.

Thankfully I have been using Brave a whole lot more recently and I’ve really been enjoying an internet where display ads aren’t ruining the experience, and where my privacy isn’t being harvested as I use it.