VPN by Google One
one.google.com
one.google.com
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 other VPNs? At least, we know who runs Google.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131016033046/http://www.foreig...
I can not believe how many people just blindly recommend VPN like some silver bullet.
Using untrustworthy VPN as a privacy solution is like jumping from the fire into the pavement 20 stories below.
Any other operator runs the risk of becoming high jacked by other state operators. If you can hack Sony, break DNC email servers, hospitals for records, manipulate windows server functionality or create Stuxnet than a VPN is a cake walk.
A VPN was until this offering from Google a trolley problem. I gladly pay for Google products because they work for me. I even upload my porn to Google Photos because of the superiority of their streaming capabilities coming from the youtube backend.
> In order to provide peace of mind for our users that their activity is private from the VPN operator and from potential attackers, VPN by Google One does not log user activity on the network or other information that could reveal personally identifiable information about them. The following data is NOT logged by the VPN for a given user:
● Network traffic, including DNS
● IP addresses of the devices connecting to the VPN
● Bandwidth utilized by an individual user
● Connection timestamps by user
EDIT: actually, from the whitepaper [0] it sure looks like they don't even get that much - you authenticate with one set of servers and then get a token to pass to the VPN tunnel servers via 'RSA Blind Signing', and so the tunnel servers never know the account that they're proxying data for. That's actually pretty awesome, if the service as implemented matches the service as described.
0: https://www.gstatic.com/subscriptions/marketing_page/vpn/whi...
"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."
Translation: Coming Soon: Tell us all about yourself and everything you do by signing up to our new service Google One. It comes with a VPN! Trust us, we won't tell!
> iOS, Windows, and Mac coming soon
It seems that some think you can fool people all the time with 'services' like this but companies like Google don't ever learn from their own mistakes. [0] [1] Phrases like 'Privacy and security is core to everything we make.' is another snake-oil tagline which is another branded trap. Not falling for this one.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/apple-bans-facebook-vpn/
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/googles-also-peddling-a-da...
Why does all this crap need it's own app? We have standard protocols for this and some of them are actually very good.
But Google doesn't need your browsing history via the VPN connection. It only needs you to continue using the same browser you normally do, so that they can do their normal cookie tracking for Ads...
Google One is Google's paid-storage-plus-premium-support-for-consumer-products service.
You could view it as, in an imprecise way, the consumer counterpart to Google Workspace (formerly G Suite, formerly Google Apps.)
However, paid Google services may be cancelled but they have terms of service.
For example, Google Workplaces (used to be called GSuite) states that they use none of your data for advertising and make privacy claims. I am a relatively new customer and I believe it. On the other hand, there are good alternatives like ProtonMail and FastMail for people who don’t trust Google.
I have been paying for both ProtonMail and FastMail for quite a while, but I find my personal workflow better with Google Workplaces: things like automatic email and calendar integration and also Cloud Search that lets me search every digital artifact in my life from one place.
What finally convinced me was that both my former employer CapitalOne and also my current employer Olive AI trust Google Workplaces, so why shouldn’t I.
Of course people make their decisions based on trust.
Plenty of room for people to make their own choices.
Btw. other VPN services are not secure from intelligence services either. If anything NordVPN and others get extra scrutiny and monitoring allocated for them.
So I am really interested in an answer here: Is there any beneficial use case for this?
They say it's security? How is this more secure than regular HTTPS? What do I gain by paying for this?
> What do I gain by paying for this?
Some people who use "pay for VPN" do this to protect their browsing privacy against "the first mile" (read: your ISP or sloppy free WiFi).
Security is a very, very broad brush.
I like the honesty here. Oftentimes you learn more about someone's intention by paying attention to the omissions.
That seems unlikely.
"1. Some minimum logging is performed to ensure quality of service, but your network traffic is never logged and your IP is not associated to your activity."
Even with that fairly well spelled out promise, I trust google about as much as I trust $RANDO_VPN, so... hardly at all?
Does this mean your incoming IP, or your outgoing IP? And if payment info or Google identity is associated with your activity, why would they need to bother associating an IP to your activity?
[1] https://1.1.1.1/
It you can't beat them, join them!
Is this Poe's law in action?
> 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?
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
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 Android only) provider change that? It doesn't increase Google's ability to spy on you, and it decreases other people's ability to. Which, insofar as your private information is valuable to Google, it makes sense for them to do as effectively as possible, even if you take the most cynical view of their motives.
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.
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.
can someone eli5 please?
So, no customer support for non-paying customers, but I don't think that applies here.
The price is zero if you are already on that Google One tier, which is pretty good.
Whether its good if you aren't depends on not just the VPN service itself, but how much you value the other things provided by Google One.
You can't stop companies from gathering information when you interact with their services but you can do things to avoid having all that information aggregated (it would require using different IP addresses for different services, so a VPN can help, among other things).
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.
VPNs are to allow you to connect to a private network over a public network. They are not about user privacy. Once you hit that private network, privacy is determined by other protocols, not the VPN itself.