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I can't believe all the cynicism here, I would _love_ a free VPN from a reputable company. If Google wants to anonymize my data and use it to understand what websites are most popular, that's fine with me.
So basically Google is sending traffic through servers that will give them a slightly less precise idea of your location. Count me out. I'm staying away from Google.
I think the idea is, currently a website owner can get a fairly good idea where you are. What google wants to do is change things so google knows exactly who you are and visited that website and what you looked at and searched for. And the website owners can get that if they pay google. And if they don't they have no idea who or where you are. Yeah no thanks.
Imagine that - you pay Google for analytics and they tell you "oh, its a bunch of people using our free proxy service. It's extra to find out more." Seems real fishy.
That anyone would take seriously any fundamental privacy protection solution from Google is laughable. After years of persistent data mining on a gargantuan scale rivaled only by Microsoft and maybe Meta, a company like this simply does not deliver a free bonus of genuine anonymity support.
For the youngins, in the mid 2000s they branded a very similar service as “Google Web Accelerator” by saying their servers would deal with TCP slow-start for you faster than your home connection. The goal of course was to get you to tunnel all your traffic through their tracking/stalking engine.
https://thetaplane.com/services/notable
The most famous secret on the net!