Google is bringing Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) to Android 17, closing a privacy hole that allowed ISPs to see which websites you visit even when using HTTPS. Until now, even with HTTPS and encrypted DNS, your ISP could often still see which domains you were visiting because the website name could be exposed during the TLS handshake
Sounds like VPNs are becoming useless, right? Not really.
ECH only works on websites that support it, and adoption is still far from universal. More importantly, it doesn't hide your IP address or encrypt your entire connection like a VPN does. Your ISP can still see the servers you're connecting to and potentially infer quite a bit from that metadata.
So IMO this is a genuinely good privacy improvement from Google, but it's not a VPN replacement. A VPN hides considerably more of the connection from your ISP.
Still, it's nice to see privacy becoming part of the internet infrastructure instead of something users have to bolt on themselves.
Source: r/RecommandedVPN · by /u/Minimum-Aerie9426