this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

ITT people claim that a Google VPN is a bad product for all use cases because Google is not a privacy-respecting company. This ignores all non-privacy use cases for using a VPN.

And even for privacy, this would've been a product where the vendors interest in protecting your privacy and your interest in protecting your privacy aligned in the case where you were not hiding from Google. For example if you used a Chromebook laptop, used the Google Chrome browser, or used Google services like Google Search and Google YouTube, then Google would already know everything about you. You can't hide your activity from them, but they can help you hide it from others.

Similar situations exist for other privacy disrespecting companies like Microsoft and Apple, where a user might reasonably want to hide from everyone other than their vendor of choice, whose product they consider good enough to allow them to see their computer activity as part of their payment. If you already subscribe to one privacy disrespecting vendor, it makes the most sense to go all-in.