It occurred to me that Apple (I have an iPhone 15 Plus) and Google (I always use Google Chrome on my PC, but Safari on my iPhone, but I also use Gmail) can probably see your browsing data, and I was wondering if they can still see it when you use a VPN, or Double VPN?
are you logged on? Then definitely yes
Chrome has zero privacy whatsoever and safari im not sure if you are concerned about privacy use a browser like brave on your phone and either brave or Firefox on your PC
A vpn will keep your isp from seeing what you do but the browser company can still log things (brave does not Firefox does not)
Google can see your Google activity always. If you’re logged in, it’ll be easier for it because it has a direct link. Otherwise, it can still identify you via browser fingerprinting and device fingerprinting. A VPN can’t hide that info. A VPN will give you anonymity, but it’s stupidly easy for Google to deanonymize datasets because they have so much to compare against.
That’s probably why VPNs are pivoting from “we’ll protect you from all online threats” to actually including antivirus, tracker and ad blockers and other stuff (like Nord does). VPNs are great for unblocking Netflix and pirating stuff, and they do some good for privacy, but they’re not a silver bullet.
Namely, communication to almost all websites is already encrypted (if they’re HTTPS). So the VPN encryption tunnel really only protects you from your ISP. When you’re on a VPN, sites communicate with the VPN instead of you, and that gives you a layer of anonymity against most sites, but tech giants like Google can still put two and two together to end up with a matched dataset, because it can still match your browser fingerprint to that search activity.
Now deanonymized data probably doesn’t get logged in the same way as user data is, but we can only guess at that.
DuckDuckGo Browser is my current favorite for Privacy Protection
Have you never given thought to using a privacy based browser live Brave or Vivaldi? As well as running a VPN?
Apple and Google can see it even if you are not logged in.
They own the browser, doesn’t matter if the traffic goes through a VPN or not.
Brave is Chrome-based. Does it synch your browser-data (including history)? Does Brave have its own cloud-services for that, or are they using the default Google-Service that come with chrome?
I know you can create an account and it can sync across devices…I’m not sure about what cloud service it uses
Brave has nothing related to google connected to it.