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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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