Many Google products start out as a public beta. In some cases, this can last for years and is an important milestone when they leave that mark behind. Today, the Google Fi VPN is no longer beta. This not only means it is gaining a new place in a redesigned “privacy and security” section of the Google Fi app, but it also means it is coming to iPhones.
The news is courtesy of a blog post published by Google earlier today. In case you’re not familiar, Google Fi has a VPN available to customers that helps you save money. I know, it sounds strange, but Fi encourages customers to connect to public Wi-Fi hotspots so they can reduce their use of mobile data. To ensure that customers can trust this connection, the company offers a free VPN that maintains their security even while they take advantage of these free bits. That’s it: Google Fi saves money for customers.
You can read Google’s documentation to learn more about how VPN works. But the short version is: you can trust it as much as you can trust Google, and any other devices on these open networks cannot see what you are doing under the veil of encryption. Google also offers a similar service for Google One subscribers as a VIP privilege.
The enhanced network VPN has been explicitly labeled “beta” for a long time, but Google is changing that today. After years of use and trust, Google Fi customers can trust it. As part of this change, VPN is also being implemented for Fi subscribers using the iPhone later this semester and will be moved to a new “privacy and security” section in the Google Fi app, which appears to merge “existing privacy, sections “” spam “and Fi Network Tools together in a single menu. It is not yet active for us, but Google says it will start rolling out today – probably via an application update or a server signal.
As part of the announcement, Google also highlighted other privacy improvements that Fi customers can enjoy, such as preventing spam calls and protecting against SIM exchange attacks, thanks to things like account change notifications and associated two-factor authentication to your Google account.
