Google Chrome's new "IP Protection" will hide users' IP addresses

Google Chrome's new "IP Protection" will hide users' IP addresses
bleepingcomputer.com

I'm always cautious about Google proposals about privacy, this might have some catches that make it bad, but I don't immediately see (here or on the linked repo) what the catches are.

My bigger objection is honestly just cost? I guess I'm overestimating the extent of the data Google is going to be using, but I feel like I might have questions about how sustainable this is to build directly into a browser with no subscription or payment plan in front of it at all. I guess it's also opt-in, so Google might be banking on very few users ever enabling it. Funny how we decide what Chrome features are opt-in and opt-out. Or maybe it's just a way to get users to log in to Chrome instead of using it logged-out.

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Note that if you're on iOS you can also set up a similar service through Apple; it costs money but from the look of things it's more comprehensive and will do a better job than what Google is proposing. So I'm not sure "we proxy your traffic and we're thinking about using multiple hops to do it" is actually that revolutionary.

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But I don't immediately hate the idea, it seems like a good change and it seems like it should be a tangible increase in privacy, and it seems like the kind of effort I'd want to get behind. I like that in phase 0 they're including their own domains in the list (it is funny to think of Google needing to protect you from Google, but realistically if they had said "we won't use IP addresses to track" and then exempted themselves, I would be more critical). I don't like that they're planning to tie it to sign-in, but apparently that's temporary and will go away after a while? If they do eventually move to a 2-hop system, that will help address a lot of the "now Google knows what the destination is" concerns.

This seems kind of garbage and is more granular than I'd like:

> As many online services utilize GeoIP to determine a users location for offering services, Google plans on assigning IP addresses to proxy connections that represent a "coarse" location of a user rather than their specific location, as illustrated below.

But they're not wrong that course geography is still better than a full IP address.

We'll see. It seems like this has the potential to be positive, I just get nervous about Google because of gestures wildly at everything.

Count me out. I'm staying away from Google.