Google VPN was doomed from day one – how lack of trust meant it never had a chance

Google VPN was DOOMED from day one - YouTube

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You can watch this article as a video on The Privacy Lab's YouTube channel.In October 2020, Google launched a virtual private network. Of course, this seemed out of character – one of the most data-hungry companies in the world whipping up a product to help people protect that exact commodity. But, on paper, Google VPN looked pretty good. It had a huge server network and because it came bundled with premium Google Drive plans, for many it was effectively "free." There were murmurings that it could even dethrone the big names that populate our guide to the best VPNs overall.However, in April 2024, it was announced that the VPN was destined for the Google graveyard. By June, it was dead and buried.As ZDNet reported, Google stated: "We're refocusing our efforts to support more in-demand features with Google One. To keep our subscription service fresh, we're discontinuing the VPN feature." In short, Google's reasoning was that people simply weren't using it.But that was just a cover story.A clash of philosophies

(Image credit: Getty Images)To understand Google VPN's issues, you have to look at the business model first. Effectively, Google is a data and advertising company. It makes money by tracking your searches, mapping your locations, and ultimately building a very specific profile around you to sell targeted ads.However, VPNs are designed to stop exactly that. By encrypting your data, VPNs allow you to hide what you're doing from your internet provider, government, and any hackers on dodgy networks. By changing your IP address, they make it harder to build a profile from your activity. Naturally, people were skeptical of Google developing such a product.To build trust, Google published white papers, open-sourced the apps, and even commissioned independent audits. For example, in its official technical white paper, Google laid out how hard it worked to protect your data, writing:"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."Cybersecurity firm NCC Group agreed, writing in its public report that it found the system to have "a robust implementation and a strong technical security posture."The truth is that Google's VPN was very secure. But even with these stamps of approval, most of us struggled to look past the irony of asking an advertising giant to secure your web traffic. The audience looking for privacy didn't trust Google, and the audience that trusted Google didn't care about privacy.A VPN limited by design