Personally, I'm going to sign into both anyway. One less thing to sign into saves me time. That makes me happy. I dunno if I'm in the minority or not. But, it's a feature that at least some people find useful, so, I think branding it spyware is unjustified. It's not like it's a keylogger sending my data to who knows where which no reasonable person could ever find useful.
People similarly dismissed concerns about information Facebook was sharing with third party apps that seemed to just provide quick entertainment like "the which celebrity are you most like quiz!" Years later, it turned out to be part of a massive data-mining operation meant to get information about voters.
You could point out reasons why this isn't the same thing, but you'd be missing the point. I, as an individual, can't fully assess the privacy impact of every single piece of technology I use, and what seems to be a benign feature backed by a corporation I trust could be anything but.
That being the case, we need to adopt certain heuristics to help defend our privacy. Granting as few permissions as possible for applications we use, and avoiding using a single identity across all of our devices is a good way to mitigate that risk.
Are you an individual that is willing to reduce your privacy a bit for added convenience? That's perfectly fine. But the ethical thing for Google to do would be to make this an opt-in feature, rather than an opt-out. The fact that they made this browser/Google Account sync the default was no accident. They want to gather more data on their users, and know if their users were stopped and prompted to think about whether or not they actually wanted this convenience, they would have less participating users. So they've made the unethical choice, and made this an opt-out feature.
I'm curious what the privacy implications are with having a work managed gmail account. While I know that in many cases the 'employer managed gmail' can be read by the employer, it isn't clear whether this also applies to bookmarks and other stuff. Recently chrome has started associating bookmarks with gmail/google accounts (if you are logged into that account) which I have never heard of a browser doing before. Pretty lame if you ask me, and it is spyware.
Besides possible privacy issues one major problem with google accounts is that google doesn't work with "accounts". It works with "people" or "corporations". So if they think that corporate account X and private account Z are actually same person (decided by some obscure algo) they will link them in their DB and in case of any infraction, real or not, they will hellban both of them. And as we know there is no such thing as human support or appeal process with google. Don't use your private accounts anywhere where they might be linked, not even for password restore field. There are already enough horror stories about people losing gmails, youtube channels and so on, forever.
Your anecdote is a sample size of one that shouldn't be extrapolated from.
Personally having my entire browsing history linked to my name and sent off to a company for analysis and profit is a concern, and this is a deal breaker for me. As such I will no longer be using Chrome as my default browser.
Personally I think auto login should be opt in and never a default or requirement.
Specially when it's Google. They are super creepy and facilitators of a future where users have zero privacy but don't have the intelligence to care about it.
Google does some things that I think are very cool. Google does some things I don't think are so cool. None of the things that Google does, however, can in any way be compared to the things that a child rapist does. Making that comparison is wrong.
