Matthew GreenOne of the most interesting recent privacy developments is the deployment of big two-hop IP blinding VPNs by companies like Apple and Google. These systems are designed to ensure that even those companies can’t link web requests to IP addresses.
For example, Apple has iCloud Private Relay for Safari browsing. The first “hop” is a server run by Apple itself, so Apple sees IP addresses. But web connections get relayed to a second VPN provider that isn’t Apple: hence Apple can’t link source IPs to destination servers.
It’s not just Apple. Google has their own system in the “Privacy Sandbox” that goes by the (less cool) moniker “IP protection”. (Come on Google, get a better marketing team.) It’s experimental and was linked to Chrome, although they seem to have deprecated that integration (but not the service.) https://privacysandbox.google.com/protections/ip-protection
Anisse@matthew_d_green IP protection is being discontinued with most of the rest of privacy sandbox.
@Aissen It’s being discontinued for Chrome but they’re still using these tools internally I believe.
@matthew_d_green what do you mean using it internally? Like a corporate VPN for outbound connections?
@Aissen Inbound stuff like private inference.