Google One has completely eliminated Africa from its VPN support and dark web reports, leaving millions of customers in Africa with low storage capacity and vulnerable to identity fraudsters who use the dark web.
Google One is a subscription service offered by search giant Google that offers users with additional storage space in their Google accounts, as well as additional benefits and features such as discounts on Google products, 24/7 support, and family sharing of storage plans.
Google One plans start at 100 GB of storage space and go up to 30 TB.
The service also includes automatic backups for Android devices, extra benefits for Google products such as Google Play credit and hotel discounts, and advanced features like access to Google experts for personalized help with Google products and services.
Now, Google has revealed that its VPN service will now be available for all Google One subscribers, including customers that pay for the basic plan that goes for $1.99.
“Starting today, and rolling out over the next few weeks, we’re expanding VPN access to all Google One plans, including the Basic plan that starts at $1.99. The VPN will be available in 22 countries across Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac devices. You can also share the VPN with up to five others if they’re on your Google One plan,” says Google in a blog post.
The service is accessible in the following locations:
- Austria
- Australia
- Belgium
- Canada
- Denmark
- Finland
- France
- Germany
- Iceland
- Ireland
- Italy
- Japan
- Mexico
- Netherlands
- Norway
- South Korea
- Spain
- Sweden
- Switzerland
- Taiwan
- United Kingdom
- United States
Notice that no African countries feature in the list, not even markets such as Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria and Ghana where Google enjoys millions of customers who use its services daily.
VPN by Google One enhances the security of one’s online activities regardless of the applications or browsers used by hiding the IP address, thereby preventing hackers or network operators from gaining access.
Visiting sites and using apps without a VPN allows them to track your location and monitor your activities through your IP address.
Google One further takes multiple measures to ensure that an individual’s identity cannot be linked to their network traffic.
These VPN features are handy, and we hope Google will avail them to additional countries in the coming days.
Dark web report
Also revealed during this announcement is the availability of dark web reports for Google One customers.
Specifically, digital identity fraud is becoming increasingly prevalent due to data breaches, which affect millions of individuals annually.
Much of the stolen information can be found on the dark web, an inaccessible portion of the internet that necessitates a specialized browser and is not indexed by search engines.
Google One is now offering a dark web report that enables individuals to search the dark web for their personal information, including their name, address, email, phone number, and more.
If matching data is discovered on the dark web, Google One will notify the individual and provide suggestions on how to protect the information.
The dark web report is available to all Google One plan members in the United States.
Plans
Chances are that you are already using Google One services if you constantly upload images to Google Photos because Google no longer allows customers to store their images in the cloud for free.
People who have also exhausted their free 15GB free plan have also been forced to upgrade to Google One because such accounts are unusable without additional storage for their mail, attachments, or the aforementioned images to Google Photos.
