We (i.e. those of us who work in the industry and care about such things) really need to work on messaging to get through to normal people.
For instance, people are genuinely freaked out at the idea of Facebook listening to them through their phones. It really hits a nerve. Now that isn’t happening, but what is happening is even worse. Facebook are able to predict your behaviour, your thoughts, so well that it gives the illusion that they’re listening to you. They’ve spent decades training their models on your behaviour, your content, both on their website and across the entire web and beyond. And they’ve fucking nailed it.
That’s far far more scary than them listening to you. They know things about you that you don’t even say out loud. It’s terrifying.
Yep, Mullvad is the one. No fishy pricing structure, transparency, and they don’t force you to use their apps like other VPN providers. So if you want to route a docker container or network appliance through it you can just download the config files and away you go. So many VPN providers used to let you do this but then stopped so you have to use their apps (and we should be asking why they want you to use their apps, because the answer is usually control and data).
Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).
They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.
Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.