VPN by Google One Comes to iOS

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11 points·HieronymusBosch··5 comments

When Facebook offered a mobile VPN to surveil all your mobile traffic, at least they didn't have the gall to charge you for it as well.[0]

This just seems like an attempt to copy Apple's new private relay that's included in all of their iCloud+ plans, without any of the clever privacy protection.[1]

[0] https://www.engadget.com/2019-02-22-facebook-shuts-down-onav...

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/icloud-private-relay-...

I don't get it. Isn't the whole point of using a VPN to hide your traffic to some minimal extent from the FAANGs of the world? Why would I run even more of my traffic through Google than I would otherwise? What on earth does this "protect" me from?

I might as well just trust an MITM Google CA and have done with at this point.

VPNs provide confidentiality and integrity while accessing untrusted networks if configured correctly. There are other networks than FAANG that are untrustworthy.

It’s promising not to log traffic or associate traffic with the user.

That’s the same promise other VPNs make.

And frankly I suspect google has much better security people to implement it.

Having worked at Google in the past I understand that they do track a lot of information but their compliance team actually has teeth. I trust that they do exactly what they say (in legal documents) with the data. If they say they don't record it I trust they don't record it. If they don't use it for tracking I believe that. If they delete it within 30 days they do.

Any time you started up new storage at Google you got someone coming after you a day later asking you to detail exactly what type of data was being stored and what the retention rules were.

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