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When most people think about a VPN, they think about encrypting their internet connection.
For years, that has been one of the simplest ways to protect yourself online. A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel for your traffic and keeps your personal IP address from being shared directly with every website and service you use. It is especially valuable when you’re connected to a network you don’t control.
But our team kept returning to a simple question:
Is an encrypted connection enough if ads and trackers are still trying to reach you?
The answer was no.
Every day, websites and apps attempt to connect to services beyond the one you chose to open. Some deliver advertising. Others help companies measure activity or follow it across the internet. Some can expose you to malicious domains.
Managing these connections has traditionally meant installing another browser extension, changing DNS settings, or configuring different tools on every device.
Protecting your privacy shouldn’t require stitching together a collection of products and hoping they all work.
So we’re building more protection directly into Cloaked VPN.
A smarter approach to everyday protection
Ad and tracker blocking gives you a simple way to prevent connections to known advertising and tracking domains while Cloaked VPN is connected.
The controls live inside Cloaked, and your choices apply across your account. Choose the categories you want to block, and your VPN connections use those preferences to help protect your devices.
Filtering happens through DNS: the system that translates a name like cloaked.com into an address your device can reach. When you’re connected to Cloaked VPN, those DNS requests travel through the encrypted tunnel. If a requested domain matches a blocked category, the filtering service doesn’t return a usable address, and the connection doesn’t begin.
This means blocking can happen before an ad or tracker loads, without reading or changing the contents of the page you’re viewing.
Protection beyond the browser
Browser extensions can be useful, but their reach generally ends with that browser.
Because Cloaked’s filtering works through the VPN’s DNS path, it can apply to traffic from apps as well as browsers as long as that traffic is routed through the VPN. You don’t need to configure a separate blocker for each browser, and your preferences are tied to your Cloaked account.
This is about more than seeing fewer ads. If a connection to a tracking domain is blocked, that domain cannot use that request to load content or collect information from your device. It is one less invisible connection happening in the background.
No blocker can remove every ad. Ads delivered from the same domain as the content you requested may still appear, and DNS-level blocking does not rearrange a website or remove every empty space.
We want to be clear about that. The goal is meaningful, broad protection from known ad and tracking domains and not a promise that every page will be completely ad-free. Although, that would be nice.
Privacy that works in the background
Ad and tracker blocking is built alongside Cloaked’s WireGuard-based VPN.
When you set up the VPN, your device creates its own cryptographic key. The private part remains on your device; only the public part is used to prepare the secure connection.
Once connected, your traffic travels through the encrypted VPN tunnel, and your filtering preferences are applied through its DNS service.
The iOS and Android apps are also designed to monitor the tunnel and recover from common connection interruptions, such as moving between Wi-Fi and cellular service. Where supported, you can use your device’s on-demand or always-on VPN setting for more continuous protection.
The result is an important new layer of privacy that works without requiring you to manage a separate technical system. Empowering you to have security without overhead is a proud statement that we are delivering on.
Where we’re headed
Privacy is not limited to information that has already been exposed.
It also includes the data moving between your device and the internet, the services trying to connect in the background, and the decisions you should be able to make about what reaches you.
Our vision is to make those protections easier to understand and easier to use. That means bringing secure connections, unwanted-domain blocking, data removal, identity protection, and other privacy tools together in one place.
Ad and tracker blocking is another step toward that future: privacy protection that works across more of your digital life, with less work from you.
Starting August 17th, Cloaked customers on iOS and Android can find Ad & Tracker Blocking in Network Protection settings. Turn on the protection you want, connect Cloaked VPN, and browse with fewer unwanted connections happening in the background.
We’re excited for you to try it and we’re just getting started.
