If you’re a Chrome user you’re being tracked. We hoped it would be less invasive by now with the death of tracking cookies. But it isn’t. In fact it’s worse with the surprise revival of digital fingerprinting, a practice even Google has described as “wrong.” But there’s finally some light at the end of this long, dark tracking tunnel. That’s the good news. The bad news is you need to change how you use your browser.
Google is updating how your IP address is tracked as you use Chrome, which means harvesting your location and activity across the web. The company has shared plans for IP Protection, “a feature that limits availability of a user’s original IP address in third party contexts.” That means your IP address is hidden from data trackers, including some belonging to Google’s itself. The catch is that “the scope of this proposal is limited to Chrome’s Incognito mode,” which means only private browsing benefits.
If this sounds like Apple’s Private Relay, that’s because it is. Private Relay masks your IP address, hiding the combination of your own IP and your destination IP (the sites you browse) from anyone, including Apple. And just as with Private Relay, Google will provide an anonymized, “course” locational IP to ensure localized browsing still works.
Apple’s Private Relay “is designed to protect your privacy by ensuring that when you browse the web in Safari, no single party — not even Apple — can see both who you are and what sites you’re visiting. When Private Relay is enabled, your requests are sent through two separate, secure internet relays.”
Now as Google explains, “IP addresses are essential to the basic functioning of the web, notably for routing traffic and to prevent fraud and spam. However, like third-party cookies, they can also be used for tracking. For Chrome users who choose to browse in Incognito mode, we wanted to provide additional control over their IP address, without breaking essential web functionality.” Once operational, Google will see your IP address but will engage a third-party to control the other proxy that accesses destination IPs. Even Google won’t see both IP addresses, the company says. Just like Apple.
With Apple’s Private Relay, “your IP address is visible to your network provider and to the first relay, which is operated by Apple. Your DNS records are encrypted, so neither party can see the address of the website you’re trying to visit. The second relay, which is operated by a third-party content provider, generates a temporary IP address, decrypts the name of the website you requested, and connects you to the site.”
The catch, again, is that this will only work for private browsing sessions in Chrome. If you’re browsing normally, then the new protections don’t apply. That’s different to Private Relay, which protects all your Safari traffic. One step a a time.
This protection from IP tracking is still in development but will come much faster than Google’s other new privacy innovation, a one-click global prompt to disable tracking cookies in Chrome. That will be almost certainly be caught up in regulatory and industry discussions and could take some time to reach your browser.
Meantime, IP Protection will be another reason to browse privately in Chrome.
