I believe Android may be different, but for desktop, if you're signed in, you essentially cannot turn sync fully off. You can turn off most of the data types, but it really is still running, as long as you're signed in. Signing in more or less is syncing.

That is, until the DICE project, which I believe has started development already. I think DICE should address both of these problems. Assigning to ewald@ who can comment more accurately and might have feature bugs to dedupe this into.

Thanks for the feedback, Randy! Addressing your points:

> The operation of logging into Chrome but not turning sync on is not well supported

First, just as na FYI, in the sync confirmation dialogue (which gets shown at the end of the "Sign in to Chrome" flow), we do have a link directly to advanced sync settings. These settings can be toggled before sync actually starts (see https://screenshot.googleplex.com/UhZHHAu6S8G.png). Sync doesn't start until you leave the settings page, so you can guarantee none of the datatypes get synced.

You're right that once you're there, there's no easy way to simply "completely turn off Sync" (you have to manually uncheck each of the datatypes). To Sky's point, go/project-dice will fix this issue. "Signed in with Sync off" will become a much more common (and well supported) state. We're unlikely to do anything in the interim until that launches, so I'm not going to track this separately.

> Once one has turned sync off, it still shows up as being on on the main settings page.  With "custom settings" (technically correct? :-}).  I think this is misleading to untrue, depending on how pedantic one wants to be.

It's a fair point, and one which we debated when implementing the new sync settings UI. Ultimately, we felt that saying "Sync off" would be even more misleading, because as Sky described, there is still sync activity even when you've unchecked all the datatypes (e.g. internal metadata, such as your device info, is still synced).

Again, once dice has rolled out, "Sync off" will be a more well supported (and common) state :)

Hope that helps answer your questions!

It does, thank you.  I'll look forward to DICE.