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Comment by sleavey | Hacker News Reader

Will Google monitor visited sites?

"Google will never use the VPN connection to track, log, or sell your browsing activity¹"

"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?

They won’t at the vpn connection but they will elsewhere. And they can design the vpn to make tracking at other layers more possible.

> your IP is not associated to your activity

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?

If you read the article then you would already know the answer to this question. They are using a blinding protocol so that the service that terminates the VPN is unaware of the identity of the user.

And yet this product is being built by an advertising company who's business model revolves around tracking your online activities to sell you to advertisers, which makes me deeply suspicious that there isn't some way using this makes you more trackable (by them) than using a different VPN

No: https://www.gstatic.com/subscriptions/marketing_page/vpn/whi...

Haha... Sure..

That’s helpful. I and many others will nonetheless be skeptical given their advertising business is in conflict with our privacy.

It says that personally-identifying information is not present on the VPN endpoint and no user data is logged, only service metrics with no identifiable information. Specific data logged and not logged appears on page 4 and 5 of the whitepaper.

As with browser/device fingerprinting, I expect "service metrics" to be able to identify users regardless if their name is attached to it.

It says that the users "cannot be identified" which is a much stronger statement than you are giving them credit for.

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