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> There's no free lunch.

Of course there is. No sign-in at all.

My question should have been: Why do I have to sign in?

Presumably for keep track of statistics reliably.

Why not use a cookie, or html5 storage? Is security really a concern here?

because then they can't run reports across all users/languages. This is an awesome dataset that (I hope) they are collecting for language designers.

Why not? How does cookie storage of information about your progress prevent those reports?

Presumably they are storing that information in their back-end somewhere.

I don't know about you, but I have a windows desktop, a windows laptop, and a macbook pro that I regularly work from in different contexts. I much prefer cloud services that store my account information, and let me log in from whatever computer I want ... local storage would remove that benefit for users like me who don't really care that they're using my google login ;)

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