On my P9P, there is an option to enable the free Google VPN. Is there any reason not to use this?
I’ve been using it for a long time now. Never had any issues other than Android Auto not liking it.
You probably lose some speed and add latency
I’d say if you have no reason to be on a VPN. I.e. your own home network, live somewhere OK and not doing anything that needs protected then it’s fine without. Everywhere else though,yeah it’s not a bad idea
Two good reasons not to use it are (1) if you have a better VPN to hand & (2) you don’t want to feed even more of your data to a huge uncaring multinational tech behemoth.
It uses more data and battery.
The “I use everything Google and give them every piece of my data in their other products but a VPN is where I draw the line” folks are funny. I just don’t get that logic.
For me, it works fine 80% of the time. The other 20% is random connections will just not load and disconnecting/reconnecting fixes it. Or the odd “Google VPN is not supported on this account” message
One pro of the VPN is that unlike other VPN services, you’ll probably never run into random captchas or services blocking your traffic when they detect that you’re using a VPN.
It is free and works well.
I use it on public and work wifi for extra protection (according to google) and more importantly to go around the firewall and blocked sites.
You can’t use it to change your IP location. Adult sites are banned in my state so I have another VPN to be able to change my location and access those.
Works fine for me and it’s free 
It’s pretty barebones for a VPN, and Google won’t protect you from piracy. If you want something that actually protects your data and/or identity, you’ll want Mullvad, NordVPN, or SurfShark.
It probably won’t matter in the grand scheme of things, with their history of software and hardware they’ll eventually abandoned it.
I find it useful as a UK resident, I can watch BBC iPlayer anywhere in the world, normally, it would be blocked without VPN.
Because you have to trust Google.
I love my Pixel, and I’m pretty firmly embedded in the Google ecosystem, but I still would rather not be any more information to them than I have to.
Is it better than browsing naked, especially on a public Wi-Fi? Yes. But there are plenty of VPN providers out there that I trust more than Google.
Plus, if you run pihole at home, you can run pivpn and have pihole blocking wherever you go.
I would love to use it when out of the house, but I keep constantly losing all network connectivity when switching from Wi-Fi to cell data, and back to WiFi. It was so bad I had to disable it.
Every once in a while I have issues with things. Not issues with the VPN itself, but there’s multiple sites I have to disable it on, or it causes issues while trying to use their payment portals.
It’s a little glitchy and sometimes needs to be reset or else data doesn’t work. But other than that it seems to be okay. (Also I’m on Google Fi if that matters)
Gulf of America is a good enough reason for me
Adds overhead–the extent to which it may impact you is probably very limited. In general it adds about 10% more data usage, so if you’re data-conscious be aware.
In general a better question is what are you looking to gain with it? Google’s VPN doesn’t anonymize IP address and doesn’t let you do something like choose a specific endpoint. If you’re worried about data security, it’s probably not relevant to use a VPN because virtually everything is using https that encrypts data anyway.
I thought they shut that down.
If you torrent I’d stay away from it with a 10 foot pole