Google One: Free VPN starts in the DACH region; This is how it works and this user data is saved
It’s quite surprising that Google has that day Google One VPN It started in Austria and Switzerland and offers many German-speaking users the opportunity to secure their internet connection only a few months after starting in Germany. In the first announcement, some questions remained unanswered, but now Google’s terms of use show how a VPN works, what data is logged and how users can be protected more broadly from competition.
If you believe a study, more than 25 percent of all users actually used a VPN to secure their internet connection in December 2019 – a very high value in my opinion. But Google noticed some weaknesses in the VPNs available at the time and wanted to do better. This is how a VPN should do it According to legend Which started at the end of 2019 in the USA, in August in Germany and now in Austria and Switzerland.
The VPN offer is a free Google One add-on that is offered to all users who have signed up for at least 2TB of storage for €9.99 per month. It is difficult to estimate the size of the user group as a result. From the perspective of a user who lives in Austria, I was able to say for a few months: I’m paying for it, but I can’t use it – but it went by surprisingly quickly. If you live in Germany, Austria, Switzerland or one of the other eight supported countries, you can use a VPN right away Activate via Android app.
Activation is easy and use is automatic. But what is a virtual private network, why is it needed and what does Google say it does better than the competition? In a long white paper, some information and infographics that we don’t want to withhold from you have now been published.
What does a VPN do?
The vast majority of websites and services are now called in encrypted form, but the Internet provider and the connected network (in the example of an Internet café) can log the invoked URLs. On the other hand, if you use a VPN, the data will be transmitted directly to and from it so none of the intermediate stations can read anything. This is well illustrated in the graphic above. However, you should note that the VPN provider can read unencrypted data.
According to its own information, Google does not log any transmitted data and also uses a secure method of authenticating a user that cannot be mathematically broken by two separate systems. This is achieved by separately managing user authentication and online activities and only communicating with each other via individual “blind codes”. This becomes clear in the following two graphics (traditional above and Google system below).
This data is not recorded by Google
- Network traffic, including DNS
- IP addresses of devices to be connected to the VPN
- Bandwidth used by individual users
- Contact timestamps of users
This data is recorded by Google
- Aggregate Transfer Rate
- VPN tunnel total uptime
- Combined latency for VPN tunnel setup
- Combined total bandwidth
- Total packet loss rate
- VPN tunnel total failure rate
- Bulk attempts to rebuild the VPN tunnel
- CPU and memory usage for the service and/or server
- Total error rate for VPN tunnel construction
Data is required for this
- Use of the Service in the last 28 days. This metric indicates the number of times the service was used in the last 28 days. However, it does not record when and when the service was used or how much data was used.
- The number of recent attempts by the user to establish a VPN session. This ensures that the user does not exceed the maximum number of concurrent sessions. Because user IDs are encrypted, they cannot be personally identified while validating concurrent sessions.
- Server error logs with no request or response data.
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If you want to read everything again in detail, you will find it Here is the Google One VPN WorksheetWhere everything is explained long and broad. I think Google has done a good job on this point. We should not forget that the product is currently only offered to paying users, so funding is secured. If the VPN is completely free, the question mark will appear again about where to click on data or transfer ads. In this case, these questions have not yet been asked. Of course, this could change if one day a VPN was introduced outside of Google One.
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