Google recognizes the importance of supporting geo-based use cases. IP-based geolocation is used by a swath of services within proxied third-party traffic, to comply with local laws and regulations and serve content that is relevant to users. Use cases include content localization, local cache assignment, and geo-targeting for ads. The proxy used for IP Protection will assign IP addresses that represent the user’s coarse location, including country.
Chrome has published detailed plans for how masked IP addresses will still contain geographic information. Every IP address will correspond to a major metropolitan area and will respect country-level boundaries. In the US, for example, every IP address is expected to represent roughly 500,000 Chrome users. For more details, see the IP Protection Geofeed; keep in mind that this list will likely be updated over time.
IP Protection will be available for users in Chrome’s Incognito mode only, on Android and Desktop platforms. Users will have the ability to disable IP Protection. For enterprise-managed versions of Chrome, IP Protection can be enabled, but it will be off by default.
IP Protection does not impact WebView.
Other browsers, including Safari, Firefox, and Edge, also use list-based approaches to limit the tracking of IP addresses and other data from third-party domains.
More details can be found in the IP Geolocation Explainer.