The impact of consumer privacy networks on geolocation, online security, and business tactics

In response to a growing appetite for privacy and security on the internet, major tech companies including Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Cloudflare now offer a new class of anonymizing networks administered by them and tied to a specific user account. We first began identifying this class of IPs in 2022 and we refer to them as consumer privacy networks, or CPNs, to distinguish them from traditional proxies and VPNs. The consumer privacy networks most in play right now are Apple’s iCloud Private Relay and Google’s variety of VPN-like offerings associated with Google One, Google Fi, and shortly the Chrome browser.