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

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.

This is a copy of Apple's iCloud "private relay", right? But why not, here it's gonna be "free" instead of 1€/month, so I guess it's a good QoL improvement in general.

Enabling it for general browsing can cause inconvenience when accessing shops and such.

But for all the rest of the traffic, it seems tempting to obfuscafe your IP by default - provided one believes in the safety of the offering.

I'm not sure if I trust Apple or Google more with my browsing history than say ProtonVPN or something like that. But since I already use their service (Apple's here), using private relay seems to be a sensible default. If they are interested in my browsing history, they have it already.

In other news, fox volunteers to guard hen house.

> "This ensures that neither proxy can see both the client IP address and the destination. CONNECT & CONNECT-UDP support chaining of proxies."

Google are a major contributor to Envoy Proxy and Envoy is used in their stack [0]. CONNECT-UDP support was recently added to Envoy [1, 2, 3]

0. https://twitter.com/gcpweekly/status/1708883000061055151

1. https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/27714

2. https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/29557

3. https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/29651

Let's imagine this as a building block for a bigger product.

A web server may be interested to verify that a request comes out of a Google proxy server. Would it ever make sense to treat differently the requests that come from the Google servers? Or allow only them?

If a publisher could verify that a user is using Chrome, is a user more valuable because tracking them is more robust? Another reason, if those servers recognize and stop the DDoS attacks, it can be cheaper to allow only them than pay for Cloudflare.

Wonderful, having your IP hidden from everyone except Google must be wonderful for privacy. It's not like this is one of the single biggest, most abusively intrusive tech corporations in the world for pathologically surveilling everything you do at all costs no matter how much they try to paint their solutions as being in the name of security and privacy. Oh wait...

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.

It’s nice that a large chunk of web traffic (this plus safari’s private relay) can obfuscate so much traffic off of telcos who have been notorious in the past for collecting and selling traffic data. Guess they have to limit their businesses to just selling internet service like they’ve pretended to only do all along!

I now only wish Apple would allow private relay for third party apps, and allow the ability to switch it on/off for specific apps so that unsavory ones (like temu) can collect even less info on users

I wonder if this is intended to make only few companies to have control over users' data. Does anyone have an opinion about this?

This reminds me of a somewhat similar scheme Mozilla is doing (https://www.fastly.com/blog/firefox-fastly-take-another-step...) and my concerns about running my traffic through a proxy run by for-profit company haven't changed one bit.

I would literally rather shit upwind in a hurricane than enable this.

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.

> Furthermore, if one of Google's proxy servers is compromised, the threat actor can see and manipulate the traffic going through it.

Wait what? They are planning to proxy the cleartext, not https?

Hey FTC.....Antitrust is needed now. Break up Google....like ffs

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.

I just... don't see this ending well. Seems like a really bad idea. Most people who need a commercial vpn have one. But all this is going to result in is an additional step for internet traffic, by default for Chrome users. Other than the nefarious reasons, what will this accomplish?

Message board implementation that shares poster's IP address:

https://thetaplane.com/services/notable

The most famous secret on the net!

> Furthermore, if one of Google's proxy servers is compromised, the threat actor can see and manipulate the traffic going through it. > To mitigate this, Google is considering requiring users of the feature to authenticate with the proxy, preventing proxies from linking web requests to particular accounts, and introducing rate-limiting to prevent DDoS attacks.

Who are the "users of the feature" here? The users of the Chrome browser? How will they authenticate? Using their Google accounts?

It hides it from everyone….except Google.

I read this as "Google plans to compete with Cloudflare as the leading MITM attack provider".

If Google still knows my IP then this is a very minor improvement in terms of privacy. This is more likely a monopolistic move trying to harm the data collection efforts of other ad companies.

So so a nice feature (irony), now there will be a single point of control for all your traffic. Point controlled by Google and the US...

Also, it is a proxy, not a VPN, globally meaning that they could see in clear if not all the content of the traffic , at least the destination that is now hidden by TLSv3.

What is interesting is also with something like that they can grow again their ad and saas revenues: now they can easily identify "same users", also you could expect things like websites requiring authentication provided "transparently" by these proxies.

Hm. Privacy proxies can be a good idea, I'm generally in favor of them, and masking IP addresses does help with privacy. And while doing limited proxying for specific domains is not ideal (and obviously raises questions about how Google will decide which domains to use), it's also not a completely terrible middle ground for protection if costs are an issue. It's not inherently a bad idea to say "we can't solve all IP addresses for everyone, but we can get a list of trackers that we know are abusing them and specifically mask IP addresses from them."

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.

----

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.

----

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.

I don't trust Google to do the right thing here.

Trading tracking for tracking/data collection, with a bit of fear mixed in for spice