Hacker News Reader

Comment by worldwidelies | Hacker News Reader

Had no idea Google had a VPN. I don’t know why anyone would use it. As if their other data gathering methods weren’t enough. Imagine funneling all of your internet traffic through them.

View on HN

For the same reason Apple operates Private Relay. Google also cares a tonne about state censorship blocking access to its web services.

A refresher: Google runs world's largest public DNS resolver, builds a browser used by 3b+, and an OS by 2b+. If they need to harvest data, they most certainly don't need a VPN (and may be that's why they killed it).

Apple doesn’t operate Private Relay, and in fact that’s kind of the point: nodes are operated by three separate entities (Cloudflare, Fastly and Akamai IIRC). And the protocol is designed such that no entity can link your identity to your traffic. It’s actually quite cool and worth reading more about if you aren’t familiar with it.

Yep, see: https://blog.cloudflare.com/icloud-private-relay

I don’t think that’s the answer. I don’t know about Google One but iCloud Private Relay doesn’t work in China straight up. You get a message saying it’s not allowed in the territory.

Most people think of VPN as a magic tool to be completely anonymous on the internet.

Can you fault them when that's what NordVPN and others claim in their YouTube ads?

Tom Scott said it better than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

It's called capitalism. Unfortunately people rarely question the things they buy as a necessity.

It's also called false advertising. Not all responsibility lies with the consumer.

How many advertisings you know are "true"?

It's called fraud

Well, I mean, Google is planning that for all Chrome users:

https://github.com/GoogleChrome/ip-protection

Reply on news.ycombinator.com