Does this differ in any way from the VPN you get from Google Fi, that launched in 2018?
It probably differs in that you don't need to be on Fi, which is a pretty major difference.
VPN by Google One
81–90 of 129 posts
Re: VPN by Google One
#82I pay $3/month for NordVPN, but many IPs are blocked from making Google searches. I wonder if this will be compatible with Puppeteer/Playwright
Re: VPN by Google One
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1) No customer support Google One has customer support. Largely, Google One is paid support Google consumer products,. That's actually one of the main selling points. Since this is a feature of a particular Google One tier, it comes with support. > 2) it will probably be cancelled in 18 months Probably not. > 3) they already spy on me enough with search, android, google keyboard, gmail How would being a VPN (for An…
> It doesn't increase Google's ability to spy on you You're going to have to prove that. Your Android device doesn't send ALL your traffic to Google today. Using this would send ALL your traffic to Google. that 100% means it increases Google's ability to spy on you.
Read their whitepaper: https://www.gstatic.com/subscriptions/marketing_page/vpn/whi...
Client source code: https://github.com/google/vpn-libraries
What they're doing - cryptographic blinding that separates authentication from user session - is probably the best approach at subscriber privacy I've seen so far.
I wonder how they'll deal with abuse.
Re: VPN by Google One
#84I wonder if you'll be able to sign up for a GMail account using a Google One endpoint?
That's a pretty insightful question. If people use the outbound addresses of these VPNs for disproportionately abusive activities then the reputation of those IPs and netblocks will eventually decline. It could come to pass that you wouldn't be able to establish a accounts from these IPs or, if you did, it would be in some kind of penalty box initially. That would go for all major providers, not just Google accounts.
Re: VPN by Google One
#85Under the heading Security you can trust, they list:
> Google will never use the VPN connection to track, log, or sell your browsing activity¹
I can't wait for that term of contract to slyly disappear and be replaced by more confusing and obfuscated terminology in, what, maybe 36-ish months?
Re: VPN by Google One
#86Since this is service you pay for, and not paid by ads and Google says it will not track, log or sell activity it's probably fine.
PRISM
Fortunately Intelligence services won't provide their snooping services for law enforcement. You can use torrent, and stay anonymous from everyone else.
Btw. other VPN services are not secure from intelligence services either. If anything NordVPN and others get extra scrutiny and monitoring allocated for them.
Re: VPN by Google One
#87From the linked pdf in the footnotes, looks like they are rolling their own network protocol:
"At launchtime, the VPN protocol will be a Google proprietary protocol; however, to ensure a high throughput while minimizing battery consumption, we will soon adopt IPsec as the data tunnel protocol due to its native support in Android.
We may eventually use other protocols, such as Wireguard, as their native support improves or on platforms where no specific protocols have a specific advantage."
Re: VPN by Google One
#88Never in a million years would I trust google as my VPN provider. 1) No customer support 2) it will probably be cancelled in 18 months 3) they already spy on me enough with search, android, google keyboard, gmail
i was just about to say -- now they can just read from your dns directly :) guess don't use 8.8.8.8 either :)
1.1.1.1 is faster anyway :)
Re: VPN by Google One
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
What should a VPN be for if not privacy?
providing a thin smokescreen of plausibility that you are actually in the country you need to be in to access a particular media resource. Which for some reason I don't expect Google's VPN to help you with at all.
> Which for some reason I don't expect Google's VPN to help you with at all.
They explicitly say that the VPN will choose the nearest exit point for best performance so, no, it won't.
Re: VPN by Google One
#90I understand why no one would want to trust Google and after Snowden's revelations, I don't see why anyone should. But when it comes to the largest VPNs such as ExpressVPN or Nord VPN, it is impossible to tell who is truly behind them. You cannot put a name on physical person in charge which is very worrying. And since the NSA is known to use front companies to spy on people [1], why couldn't they be behind all these…
Privacy enthusiasts often seem blind to this risk. I think it's quite likely that virtually all of these VPN providers are run by either state agencies or organized criminals. As the person who personally ran almost all Tor exits for a brief period in the early 2000's, I am here to tell you that if you cannot definitely identify the operator of your VPN or proxy service, then you probably should not use it.