From August 3 2026 google starts also in Europe to use IPaddresses for adv profiling.
My question: is a VPN and or the use of iode a help to be not profiled?
I would guess this would happen on stock Android due to closed source Google Play Services embedded on the device doing whatever that only they know about?
But with iodéOS using microG your IP (or anything else) is not shared back to Google, if you aren’t logged into a Google account. I am not certain even if you are logged in to Google via microG that this is sent?
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I think the main danger would come from websites collecting your IP address (as well as a lot of other identifying data), and from applications that you install that are not FOSS and free of “spyware.”
A trustworthy VPN service - one that is audited for privacy protections and confidentiality - would mix your traffic in with a lot of other users’ traffic and show an IP address of one of their servers, not your real IP address. So in that way, websites wouldn’t be able to profile you by IP address (IPv4 or IPv6, if they’re both enabled in your system).
There will still be a lot of other tracking going on from the website. You can prevent most of that by using a privacy-respecting browser (iodé browser, for instance), a search engine that doesn’t record your searches, and privacy extensions like uBlock Origin and others in the browser.
The iodé app blocks lots of trackers, too, and not just in the browser.
But once you log into an account on the internet, you’re automatically identifying yourself, obviously.
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