Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

Combined with Privacy Sandbox [0], this means the browser can track you directly without cookies, but websites can&#x27;t track you via IP address. So it has the effect of centralising the tracking to google only.<p>I haven&#x27;t used Chrome since this rolled out, since I didn&#x27;t see a way to object to the new tracking. This is what the linked article [0] says:<p>&gt; It’s unclear if toggling these features off will stop Chrome from collecting these data altogether, or if it just won’t share the data with advertisers.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theconversation.com&#x2F;google-chrome-just-rolled-out-a-new-way-to-track-you-and-serve-ads-heres-what-you-need-to-know-213150" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theconversation.com&#x2F;google-chrome-just-rolled-out-a-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;shipping-privacy-sandbox&#x2F;#whats-shipping" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.chrome.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;blog&#x2F;shipping-privacy-sandbo...</a>

Isn’t this similar to what Apple does with Safari on iPhone where they can hide your ip address by using iCloud servers as relay?<p>Discussed here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31387019">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31387019</a> or <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27467798">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27467798</a><p>Why is it good when Apple does it but terrible when it is Google?

That&#x27;s an excellent example of the conflict of interest of trying to be an ad company and a proponent for privacy at the same time.

&gt; The Movement for an Open Web (MOW), an organization that has lobbied against Google&#x27;s Privacy Sandbox initiative by claiming it&#x27;s harmful to rival internet advertising businesses<p>They have much more to be annoyed at. VPN companies, The Tor Project, AD blockers, etc<p>I use the Google One VPN[0] to cloak my real IP, but only sparingly. For most of my Internet surfing I use a two hop VPN setup. One VPN router with kill switch mode, and then I connect to another VPN service on top of that, a sort of fake Tor &#x2F; private relay setup.<p>I don&#x27;t funnel all my traffic into Google One&#x27;s VPN. I like to compartment and not put all my eggs in one basket. Looks like I&#x27;ll be doing the same when this new Google-owned IP cloaking feature ships.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;one.google.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;vpn" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;one.google.com&#x2F;about&#x2F;vpn</a>

Wouldn&#x27;t that mean that all your web traffic is going through a google server?

We really need to be thinking bigger here — Google included, to the degree there are pro-privacy folks in the org (which there) - in coming up with something that protects a lot more than the identity via IP of Chrome users, but all web traffic.<p>I mean, maybe even rethinking IP, TCP&#x2F;IP entirely.

The anti abuse points from their github do not sound convincing to me. There will be a high value in farming accounts to either spam or attack. What do you do when the google proxy is dosing your service?

So Google is doing his why exactly? Since they know everything about everyone they now shut out the competition while sending all the IPs to their own proxy that will log them for themselves &quot;for your privacy TM&quot;???<p>I mean I would like this if it would not come from Google.

Welp Firefox it is then.

is the proxy service available for user modified browsers? otherwise this sounds like WEI with a fake mustache