The problems were easily foreseeable, and they did it anyway.

Anyone who accepts this as "listening the users", and addressing the issues will likely get burned again in the future.

Google is a advertising company. Their customers are not their users, and therefore I think things are unlikely to change.

Also, it represents a culture shift. Many engs and mgrs have moved on, retired, jumped to new shinies (when FB, Uber, Twitter, etc became the new shiny) allowing a culture shift via replacement with people who have a different compass guiding them.

> Their customers are not their users

Cannot be overstated. The incentive structure is clear and the subsequent evolution is happening.

Nothing surprising: Google's revenues come from advertisers. Advertising is its main focus. Not developing browsers, or even providing search results. Those are merely means to an end. And of course, all the users are targets for ads, NOT customers. A farmer's cows aren't his customers; same logic here.

It's obvious really, and Google never denied it.

Because there's literally nothing they could've said that would make them change their mind. This is the most reasonable response Google could've given. They've addressed every issue as promptly as possible, yet people just dismiss is as PR. It's a lose-lose battle, no matter what they do, people like this will always spin it in a negative way with zero justification.

Well they could have make the changes they're saying they're going to make in the first place. Or not have sent their developer relations goons out to say "move along, nothing to see here, folks" when people started complaining.

This is PR. It's damage limitation.

They could have removed the feature entirely, or set it to a privacy-friendly and least-surprise friendly default.

Sync is off by default, how is that not privacy friendly?

They will be deleting all cookies by default, how is that now privacy friendly?

The core feature itself, setting it off by default defeats the whole point of the feature, because it's for the 99.99% of users that are not power-users. It's also not a privacy issue because, again, sync is off by default.

Because the feature is ON by default. Naive users will not know to turn it off. That doesn't mean they don't care about privacy.

One thought might be that a company interested in making decisions based on customer feedback would consult those customers before making a change like this.

they are solving issues and bugs that they probably already planned to address. they aren't doing anything because we asked them to, they are just pandering to their audience by saying that. IMO.