Google kills "One" VPN service | Hacker News Reader

Google kills "One" VPN service

arstechnica.com

43 pointsbelter13 comments

I tried the Google One VPN, and quickly stopped using it, because it didn't offer the most basic feature of a VPN: the ability to choose your own server. Google assigned you a server somewhere near where you live, in the same country. You couldn't choose a server outside your country. I'm certain they have the capability to support this, but for some internal reason they didn't offer this (I'm betting legal stopped it), and that killed the product.

For me, being able to switch my country is the primary use case of a VPN, so I had no reason to continue using the product.

It's a huge shame, because the Google VPN has the best technical design of any VPN I've seen. It's designed in a way that Google cannot associate your Google account with your VPN traffic. I view this as extremely poor marketing.

https://one.google.com/about/vpn/howitworks

> A Google spokesperson told 9to5Google the Google One VPN is shutting down because "people simply weren’t using it."

My assumption about a Google VPN is that it would not protect my identity or internet usage from Google, who are one of the main entities I want to hide from with a VPN.

Google VPN is designed in such a way that Google cannot tell what you're using it for.

"By employing a cryptographic blind signing step between user authentication and connecting to the VPN, we give users a stronger guarantee that their network activity can't be tied back to their identity."

https://one.google.com/about/vpn/howitworks

others can't track the traffic between you and google, but google can know the traffic between them and the end server and tie to you, knowing if you use to connect to torrent sites, porn sites or whatever. They wouldn't know the content of your searchs, but the will know the sites you visit.

Yeah, I guessed they say something like that. What I meant is that I assume they're tracking me anyway, regardless of what they claim!

Good to be skeptical. I'm very suspicious of most VPNs, but Google did get an audit: https://research.nccgroup.com/2021/04/08/public-report-vpn-b...

And people probably aren't using it because they are not sure when it will get yanked.

Yep I have a rule that I need a Google service to exist a few years before I would adopt it, and even then I might reconsider. They just aren't reliable

Ads, mail, search, Android, Chrome, and Docs are about the only things I trust them not to kill.

The truth is, OS-level and application level of enforcement of a preponderance of VPN servers — one per service and probably even then in a VM — is the only thing that really probably provides any privacy protection.

If I activate a VPN on my device, it’s trivial to reconstruct who I am via a preponderance of authorized services or the sending of identifiers across the line.

I can’t help but feel that VPNs are, in most cases, merely privacy and security theater.

VPNs in the sense of Google One, NordVPN, PIA, et al. are what we used to call proxies yestercentury. A way to disguise your location (eg: to bypass geoblocking) but not much else.

A proper VPN involves server(s) that either you or your company owns, hence the trust starts and ends with you/your company (and your ISPs, I suppose).

Just like cloud computing and storage, you can't, don't, and shouldn't trust Someone Else's Computer(tm) with your sensitive data.

[dupe]

More discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40010047

It was an idiotic idea to begin with. The intersection of people conscious enough about privacy to use a VPN and people who trust Google as their VPN provider is exactly 0.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com