New Google Chrome IP Protection Feature Set to Offer Timely Value
Most people don’t give much thought to what’s going on beyond their view when they’re utilizing the Internet for whatever reason, and in an ideal world there wouldn’t be any reason for them to think about risks connected to that very normal and commonplace activity. And these days most of us are online with our mobile devices just as often as we’re doing so seated at a notebook or desktop. In much the same way your home or building has an address on the front of it, so does your spot along the information superhighway.
That’s a very simplistic way of defining what an IP address is, but it works well enough in context here as it indicated where you’re accessing the internet from, and it provides a fairly accurate ‘location’ as part of the basic workings of how the Internet functions. IP addresses allow for consistent user profiles and are needed for critical web functionalities like routing traffic, fraud prevention, and other vital network tasks.
Nine times out of 10 it is not going to matter if your IP address is ‘exposed’, meaning that there’s an identifiable spot on the Web where you’re accessing it from. But every once in a while there are real risks with having it on display like that, and so now a new feature with the world’s most popular web browser is aiming to remove that risk factor.
As you’ll find is the case with most reputable Canadian web hosting providers, we like to point out these types of developments when they have the potential to be very valuable for people. This is definitely the case here, and especially considering that you and most others who’ll be reading this are very likely doing so on a Chrome browser. So with this week’s entry here we will talk about how the newest Chrome update comes with an excellent new feature that can ‘hide’ your IP address from view.
New Google Chrome IP Protection Feature Set to Offer Timely Value
Made Anonymous
Have your IP address exposed and you’re at risk of cyberattacks of all sorts, location tracking, hacking, Cyberattacks, information intercepts, network system breaches, data transmission spying, and monitoring of your browsing activity for no-good purposes. There’s more in the way of potential bad outcomes too, and the risks of all of them are more pronounced today than ever before.
Google’s new IP Protection solution is a potential fix that redirects 3rd-party traffic from specific domains through proxies, making users' IP addresses invisible to those domains. It’s expected that IP Protecting will evolve alongside the ecosystem, and continue to adapt for optimum safeguarding of users from cross-site tracking and adding additional domains to the proxied traffic. IP address will be anonymized for qualifying traffic.
To start with this will be an opt-in feature, but it’s expected that most users will readily activate it when made aware, and their reasoning being that most people will want to have better control over their privacy and letting Google monitor behavior trends. It’s expected that there will be regional considerations that need to be taken into account to start, but that eventually there some degree of uniformity in application will be realized.
Exploratory Roll Out
Initially only the domains listed will be affected in 3rd-party contexts, with the primary focus being on those believed to be tracking users. Apparently this going to be known as ‘Phase 0’ and during it Google will be proxying requests only to its own domains and via a proprietary proxy. The understanding is that this approach will help Google test the system’s infrastructure and better define domain lists.
To start with users logged into Google Chrome and with US-based IPs will be the only ones who can access these proxies, but what goes down South usually goes up North here before long. As a safety feature that may only be temporary, a Google-operated authentication server will distribute access tokens to the proxy and each user will have a quota set for them.
Google also plans to adopt a 2-hop proxy system to increase privacy further, with a 2nd proxy run by an external CDN. The advantage of this will be that neither proxy can see both the client IP address and the destination support chaining of proxies. Google plans on assigning IP addresses to proxy connections that represent a more approximate location of a user rather than their specific location, due to the fact that many online services utilize GeoIP to determine a user’s location for offering services.
