Google planned to add IP Protection to Chrome’s Incognito mode in 2025, but later announced that it would retire the feature. It was not a general-purpose VPN: the proposal covered only certain third-party requests in Incognito, and Google’s published sources do not establish that it is available in current Chrome builds.
What happened to Chrome IP Protection?
Google’s April 22, 2025 update said Chrome planned to launch IP Protection in Q3 2025 as part of its Incognito tracking protections. On October 17, 2025, Google listed IP Protection among the Privacy Sandbox technologies it had decided to retire, following consideration of ecosystem feedback and low adoption. Google’s retirement update therefore supersedes the earlier launch plan.
The available official sources establish the retirement decision, but not the exact date the feature was removed from every Chrome channel, region, or build. The technical description below is Google’s archived proposal, not evidence that IP Protection is currently rolling out or available.
What would IP Protection have hidden?
The proposal targeted the IP address Chrome would otherwise expose to a website as a potential tracking signal. Its scope was deliberately limited: it would route requests to domains on a Masked Domain List only when those requests occurred in a third-party context inside Incognito.
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- Eligible: a request to a listed domain when that domain’s content is embedded or otherwise requested by another site in Incognito.
- Not covered by the proposal: ordinary first-party requests. If a person visited a listed domain directly as the top-level site, that site would receive the original IP address.
- Not all browsing: the proposal did not route every connection from Chrome or every app on a device.
That narrow, list-based design was intended to make it harder for participating third-party services to use a person’s original IP address across sites, while leaving IP-based functions such as routing and anti-fraud checks more workable.
How the proposed two-hop proxy design worked
For eligible requests, Chrome would use two proxy operators so that neither hop could see both the user’s original IP address and the destination. The proposal described HTTPS/QUIC proxy tunnels and a blinded authentication scheme.
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| Stage | What it would see | What it would not see |
|---|---|---|
| First hop, operated by Google | The client’s IP address | The destination website |
| Second hop, operated by an external CDN | The destination website | The client’s original IP address |
The proposal also required users to authenticate to a Google account before opening Incognito. It described blinded signatures as a way to prevent the proxies from linking requests to that account. This was a design detail of the proposal, not a statement about current Incognito behavior.
Would it have hidden your location or made you anonymous?
No. The proposed masked address was intended to retain coarse location information, including the user’s country and nearest metropolitan area, so services could still support localization and other location-dependent functions. It was not designed to let users select an arbitrary country or city.
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Changing or masking an IP address would not, by itself, conceal every identity signal. The proposal addressed a particular network identifier in a particular request context; it did not claim to make a user anonymous across the web.
How IP Protection differed from a VPN
Google’s archived proposal explicitly said, “IP Protection and VPN services have distinct purposes and features.” In its comparison, a VPN encrypts all user traffic, while IP Protection would selectively route eligible third-party requests. VPNs often let users choose a virtual location; IP Protection aimed to preserve the user’s actual coarse location. The proposal said the two systems could function at the same time.
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| Question | Proposed IP Protection | VPN, as contrasted in Google’s proposal |
|---|---|---|
| Which traffic? | Selected third-party requests to listed domains in Incognito | All user traffic |
| Where would it work? | Incognito in the proposed desktop and Android versions | Depends on the VPN service and setup |
| Could you pick a virtual location? | No; the design aimed to preserve coarse actual location | Often, depending on the service |
| Could they run together? | The proposal said yes | The proposal described the systems as able to function simultaneously |
Those are differences in purpose and scope, not a basis for treating the planned feature as a replacement for a VPN. The archived Chrome IP Protection proposal contains the design details and is no longer being updated.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What did Google test before announcing retirement?
In a July 14, 2025 Chromium developer post, Google reported a 1% stable Incognito experiment on desktop and Android. It said the experiment had shown no statistically significant movement in Core Web Vitals and no increase in crashes. The post cautioned that only a subset of traffic qualified, making the sample smaller than usual for a 1% experiment; the result should not be read as proof that performance effects were impossible.
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The experiment report was about measured performance and crashes, not proof that the feature launched broadly. Google’s later retirement decision is the latest stated plan in the cited official updates. Read the Chromium developer post.
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