 So Google recently announced this thing called IP protection, which is the same thing as NAT catcher or G NAT catcher, if you're familiar with that project from last year. And this IP protection is actually gonna be making its way into the Google Chrome browser's default settings at some future release. Now, if you've been paying attention to Google's moves over the past few years, then you know that this is something to be skeptical about at the very least and possibly even a bit concerned about since this is something coming from a company that's been acting pretty evil. And at the same time, they're saying that this new feature is for your protection and that it's for your privacy, okay, a company that makes a lot of money off of people not knowing much about digital privacy in current year. So let's read through the description of the GitHub page for the project to get an idea of their intent and whether or not it's genuine. As browser vendors make efforts to provide their users with additional privacy, the user's IP address continues to make it feasible to associate users' activities across origins that otherwise wouldn't be possible. This information can be combined over time to create a unique persistent user profile and track a user's activity across the web, which represents a threat to their privacy. Moreover, unlike with third party cookies, there is no straightforward way for users to opt out of this kind of covert tracking. In addition to being used as a possible tracking vector, IP addresses have been and will continue to be instrumental in routing traffic, preventing fraud and abuse and performing other important functions for network operators and domains. Okay, so this isn't complete bullshit. I mean, an IP address can definitely be used to track someone across the internet, but it's not as good of a tracking point as a data point to track someone as you might think. So for one, the vast majority of people who use the internet are doing so with dynamic IPs. So when you sign up for consumer internet service, your ISP, they don't just give you your own unique IP address that you have while you're using them. Sometimes they'll offer you that as an additional service for an additional fee, but if you aren't gonna be running a website or some other kind of web service out of your house, whether it be a public, private one, whatever, then a static IP would be a waste of money. And even then, there's still ways to host stuff like that out of your house with dynamic IPs. And it's gonna be especially expensive if you're paying for something like a static IPv4 address because there's not as many of those. So most of us consumers, we just use dynamic IPs which are leased to you for some period of time and then eventually they're gonna get leased to someone else and then you'll have a brand new, totally different IP. And you can also change this IP address yourself for free, sometimes at least, by just disconnecting your router for a few minutes and then plugging it back in. So this will basically make that IP refresh that your ISP does for you automatically at some time interval, just trigger automatically then. So needless to say, an IP address alone is not that great for tracking you, especially if you have multiple folks that are using your internet because everyone is gonna have the same IP or at least the same IPv4 address. And you can check this yourself by just checking what your IP address is on your computer and then on your smartphone, just make sure that they're both connected to the same Wi-Fi network. You probably have family from out of town that's staying with you for Thanksgiving, all of them using up your precious bandwidth. But again, they all have the same IP. So that IP tracking, it's not something that I personally would lose a lot of sleep over as an internet privacy enthusiast, especially when you can also use VPNs to mask your IP address as well. I mean, there's a whole lot of solutions for blocking IP tracking that don't involve sending all your traffic through Google servers. So now let's take a look at the goals here that are outlined in the proposal, right? So Chrome is reintroducing a proposal to protect users against cross-site tracking via IP addresses. Yeah, okay, we pretty much read those. So the goals are to improve users' privacy by protecting users' IP addresses from being used as a tracking vector, and then to minimize disruption to the normal operations of servers, including the use of IP addresses for anti-abuse by first-party sites until there are alternative mechanisms in place. So this part here, for the anti-abuse by first-party sites, that sounds like Google wants to not only handle the proxying of your traffic, right? This is obviously what that's talking about, but it sounds like they also want to proxy server traffic as well. And this is kind of further confirmed down here when we get into the privacy proxy, where they say we're considering using two hops for improved privacy. A second proxy would be run by an external CDN, while Google runs the first hop. Yeah, I mean, that sounds good in theory, but if the CDN is going to share data with Google or hell, even if the CDN is just owned by Alphabet, right? Because remember, Google is the child company of Alphabet. So if the CDN and Google are gonna communicate with each other, it's kind of meaningless for them to technically be two separate entities. So CDNs, if you're not familiar with them, they're commonly used by people that are running websites and web services and things like that to make them faster and more resistant to denial of service attacks, especially distributed denial of service attacks. And it actually does this by distributing your web pages, heavier assets, things like video images, stuff like that, to servers that are run by the CDN all over the world. And it also helps it load faster because if somebody in, say, India is trying to load a website that's technically hosted in New York, loading all those images is gonna take a lot longer, or not a whole lot longer, but you know, longer than if the heavier assets are hosted on a server that's actually in India. But the really important thing about CDNs in current year is that they're the only way to really defend against advanced DDoS attacks, especially ones that are utilizing botnets with thousands, tens of thousands, however many machines in them. Because even if your site is fairly lightweight, right? So let's say that you made sure to make a website that's not bloated, all your web pages are one megabyte or less in size, and you've got a gigabit connection to serve this website over, it'll still only really take a few hundred people just asking for that web page again and again, each second to slow your web page to a crawl. Now, of course, some people are going to use proxies for malicious stuff, right? Like they're talking about using it as a CDN kind of to fight anti-abuse, but then right here, there's a whole anti-abuse section. Okay, so to limit abuse of the proxy, we're considering the following non-exhaustive set of anti-abuse protections, and first one, of course, is to require a user account, right? To have the user authenticate to a proxy. So now we're able to correlate your traffic to a user account, and of course, it says right here, the proxy shouldn't be able to correlate traffic to a user account, but I mean, come on, this is Google we're talking about. They already do that, like if you surf Google, if you're using the web, especially in Google Chrome, signed in with your Google profile, everything's already being tracked to your Google account. And so Google's saying that they're not going to use this proxy service to basically do a global man in the middle attack on everybody to track users. It's a lot like a fox promising to guard your chickens and not eat any of them, especially when you look at the absolute state of Google, because they're losing this ad blocker battle, you know, which honestly they did to themselves in a big way. If they didn't strizen effect themselves, you block origin would probably still be just a, you know, not super well-known, lead hacks or browser add-on instead of mainstream. This combined with Google jacking up the prices for YouTube premium and Google Drive, and they're also deleting old emails and they're even starting to charge people on YouTube just to watch 4K videos. All of this tells me that Google is having some revenue issues. And so now they're trying to sell you something that they don't need and also obviously trying to fight back against ad blockers and basically be gatekeepers on both sides, right? Gatekeepers for the users that are trying to access the internet and also gatekeepers for people who want to run websites and have some kind of CDN to keep themselves or keep their sites actually available, you know, not getting taken down from DDoS attacks. They're trying to offer you this global proxy service that's going to hide your IP address from everyone except for Google, which is one of the main companies that you probably want to hide your traffic from.