“The flip side of Google’s always-on single sign-on experience is the lack of privacy when you need it the most”
Most people who use personal laptops stay signed in to their email & social media accounts, and Big Tech firms like Google encourage & enable this behaviour – for instance, Chrome asks you to ‘sign in’ to your browser by using your Google account credentials. That allows Google to keep all your content & browsing behaviour synced, measured & tracked – not only for themselves, but also for you, in case you’d ever wish to.
And for digital natives like me, that offer really does work well for my needs – for instance, if I want to quickly dig out an article I read 5 days ago but on a different device, I can quickly pull up the browsing history of any of my synced devices, and find that article in a jiffy… or for instance, if my failing memory isn’t helping me recognize a particular transaction on my credit card bill, and Google’s location history reminds me that it was, in fact, the charge for picking up this special pickle from this pop-up store on my way back home…
The challenge, however, is in the flip side of the coin, which is to say the utter lack of privacy that this affords users who might need to share their personal laptop with a friend or a family member, for brief periods of time, without a lot of advance notification.
When you know that stepping away from your laptop means that the person now sitting with it, has access to all your private correspondence with anyone & everyone going back over a decade, or can open up all those Google sheets you have painstakingly updated with your financial transactions, etc – that isn’t a very reassuring fact.
One defense that Big Tech is bound to use is to state that users are best advised to sign out of their accounts whenever they are letting someone borrow their devices for a few minutes, but the challenge with that is that depending on who the borrower is, you could come across as impolite at best and someone with deep-seated trust issues at worst – which kinda defeats the point.
It’s not that you don’t trust this friend/family member, but the fact that you shouldn’t need to.
And the fact that within each of our Google universes are likely pieces of content which are meant for our eyes only – and the always-on single-sign-on feature which Google provides hasn’t really been designed to deal with lack of privacy that occurs when we let one of our friends or family members into our SSO-ed Google world…
The solution?
For starters, Google definitely needs to add an option that lets users protect key Google docs files (sheets, etc) and key Gmail emails and also private Google Photos/Videos using an additional password that is not your sign-in password, and one that is not saved as a default password (which would beat the purpose of creating that additional layer of security for users that are not you).
This would be very similar to how mobile phones have added security features, like fingerprint or pattern locks, which you can set up for any app you prefer.
All we’re asking then, is a Chrome Windows version of the same additional security features that Google provides mobile users on their Android devices.