About iCloud Private Relay | Hacker News Reader

About iCloud Private Relay

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129 pointsandrewstuart138 comments

It may not work perfectly for all people in all use cases, yet ... but I have to say I appreciate and admire Apple's initiative and the values that this approach reflects. They didn't have to do this. It's not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line. It does seem like the right thing to do for individual privacy. I appreciate that and it contributes to my overall respect for the company and its approach.

It does have an immediate positive effect. People will likely switch to apple and trust it more. This means more service revenue, long term lock in and ultimately more profits.

Im moving my to-be-paid-for personal google apps accounts over to iCloud for one.

It’s not just a principled approach. Though it just makes sense. Thank god apple has minimal ad income only. Otherwise this wouldn’t happen.

The ad thing is why I stick with apple. I just feel much more comfortable paying for software and hardware that isn’t ad supported. I feel like I’m buying a product rather than being the product

But Apple is ad supported: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-shaking-up-services-bu...

Nowhere near to the degree of almost any other tech company I can think of

True, but it's depressing that Apple has decided to go down that path. They've gone from $0 ad revenue to $billions and are obviously intent on increasing that revenue even more.

As long as there aren’t ads in my standard OS features, unlike Windows, I’m very grateful

There are ads for Apple subscriptions in the Settings app. I've seen them myself.

It’s not interfering with my experience yet

Yeah, this direction worries me. I'm pretty fine with the search ads, but the moment they start trying to break into broader scopes it's going to be really hard for me to square it with a supposed reputation for privacy.

> I'm pretty fine with the search ads

Why? The cover story for App Store is that it's supposed to protect consumers, but then the consumer searches for an app literally by name, and the first hit is a completely different app that paid for an ad. How is that protecting consumers?

Moreover, Apple added App Tracking Transparency, where the cover story is privacy, but coincidentally ATT has at the same time caused people to switch more to Search Ads, because third party ads have become less effective as a result. There's a conflict of interest here.

> How is that protecting consumers?

Meh. I think the paid results are pretty well demarcated, and are, visually, nearly identical to what they looked like at launch in 2016.

Competitors bidding on keywords is definitely lame.

> It's not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line

In the UK phone operators have complained about it on the basis that:

> [it allows Apple] to leverage its considerable market power into many areas of the market and thus being able to further entrench its position ... Network providers would no longer be able to use web traffic data over Safari to develop their own digital products and services that complete directly with Apple. For example, a network provider may no longer have access to information about a user's content viewing habits to develop their own content that competes with Apple TV. Similarly, a network provider may no longer be able to share consumer insight with third parties that provide digital advertizing services in competition with Apple Search Ads...

How true that is, who knows, but it's an interesting angle on how it benefits Apple

All that verbiage to effectively say: “we cannot track the user and monetize their data.”

It implies that Apple can and will use this data to inform its own products, which does seem anticompetitive. Whether that's true or not, I don't know.

My understanding of the design of private relay is that Apple cannot see this data as it works with a third party relay (Cloudflare I think?) to blind themselves to it

That complaint by the telcos is what convinced me to turn it on, the entire thing was a big whinge by them about not being able to spy on users anymore (and the hilarious claim that Apple was doing it to move users off Safari)

They cannot see the data because they have chosen not to see it. That is different than being unable to see it. As the creator of the software, Apple could disable to circumvent its own system to bypass these protections, perhaps in response to a legal obligation. A proper implementation, something like Tor, would be a designed to blind all network participants, including the evil ones.

That may be the case, but it misses the point. If Apple is not presently doing this, then they are not abusing their market position in gain an unfair advantage.

Then the tor exit node people could read the traffic.

Do what I do, i encode all emails into giant QR codes on paper that will fade in 72 hours. I then have a staffer chain a briefcase with the email to his or her wrist and fly to the recipient in a private jet. The one time pads are delivered by a separate courier.

If you think the tor exit node looking at the traffic is equivalent, you missed the point of tor.

We’re talking about a company like Apple building a global infrastructure.

Any such scenario would result in the company or their providers controlling a lot of the infrastructure.

That’s why private relay isn’t a bad thing. You’re replacing thousands of individual risks with one. IMO, the protection of Apple’s PR is stronger than any tech.

> As the creator of the software, Apple could disable to circumvent its own system to bypass these protections

How is that new though? As the creator of Safari they could store tracking information locally and batch upload it for processing.

Apple makes the device and OS. They will always have the ability to see the data.

>They cannot see the data because they have chosen not to see it. That is different than being unable to see it

It's different in terms of security, but in terms of competition, which is what network providers complained about, there is no difference at all.

This is a pointless argument though, since Apple can deliver arbitrary over the air updates to iPhones anyway. There is nothing that iPhone hardware is physically capable of doing that Apple could not release a software update to do. Thus any evil you can conceive of is trivially within the slippery slope.

> That complaint by the telcos is what convinced me to turn it on

To be fair to telcos, (who totally don't deserve it), the original argument they made is that if all phone traffic gets routed to a relay endpoint, and not its real destination, it reduces their ability to network plan and add capacity to the routes that are actually in use.

Hearing this argument means they didn't get what they want and wanted to pull in the antitrust argument, and tipped more of their hands.

Not exactly the same, but it wouldn’t be the first time Apple did something like this. For example, Apple shows a scary “Do you consent to TRACKING” dialog for third party apps, but for their own tracking, presents a “is it okay if we use just a bit of your data to personalize your experience”?

But Apple, as the device owner/operator, can do all sorts of tracking that cannot be accomplished by anyone else. They know when your phone is on or off. They know how often your battery runs flat. They know how bright your screen is. Apple surely uses this basic data in creating products. Telemetry isn't content tracking, but it is still tracking.

My understanding from talking is that internally they set a high bar for telemetry data, which includes non correlatable data through techniques like data slicing and differential privacy.

In the case of private relay, I believe they are using privacy pass such that a token indicating authorization is anonymous on use. So say, Apple knows who someone is, but Cloudflare and the like who do the actual producing can only tell that Apple authorized proxy access and (for HTTPS) what domains are being accessed.

So Cloudflare in this example may be able to get some statistics of use and share them with Apple, but it will be more about the relative popularities of pornhub.com and cnn.com, and not what percentage or who frequent both.

Some people here need to read Apple's privacy policy. They go to extreme lengths to make sure no identifiable information leaves the device. Often times where Google sends information to the cloud to be processed (e.g. Photos data), Apple does the computation on-device. This is true for many things: analysis of photos, voice recognition, ML tasks, etc.

Take a look at their approach to differential privacy if you are still convinced their data collection is egregious: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/Differential_Privacy_Over...

When I set up macOS recently, telemetry was off by default; it was opt-in. Not sure about iOS, but I presume it is the same. So you are correct that device makers collecting telemetry have a certain advantage, but most app/content tracking systems I have interacted with are opt-out and therefor, in my view, are more invasive.

The app tracking dialog on iOS is technically opt-in, but the way it is written reflects that the system and the user have limited control, the "Ask App Not to Track" button implies that Apple acknowledges that their attempts to block tracking are best effort and are not guaranteed to work, because new and clever ways to implement tracking are being created on a regular basis.

Even when turning telemetry off there's still a huge amount of data going to apple.

For example the gatekeeper revocation check leaks a lot of data about what kind of apps you run. I'm sure some departments of apple really care about privacy but it's a big company and clearly not all of them do.

Another reason I wish Apple just stuck to hardware and software rather than expanding into stuff like Apple TV. Can’t be anticompetitive if they’re not in the market!

Apple explicitly documents that they ensure that private relay data is opaque to them, the also document the audits to show that they cannot spy on the data. As a result iCloud Private Relay is strictly more private than any other VPN service.

I guess the question is whether an end-to-end walled garden is a good solution to tracking or not?

And whether Apple can only track their own services/apps or other user data/activity. Providing Safari makes it interesting

> “we cannot track the user and monetize their data.”

unless the user consents. So evil.

> a network provider may no longer have access to information about a user's content viewing

That’s… kinda the point, no? To prevent scummy people doing scummy things.

At the same time are basically putting your trust in one company (apple) in this case to not do scummy things. But as pointed out this can be a way of helping themselves hold and expand various market positions.. which may or may not be scummy too. And who knows where they’ll be what they’ll change in a few years when the need to increase profits.

Im not supper trusting of any of these big companies. I don’t love regulations but we seem to be headed to some weird monopolistic place.

Not buying this. There is now a default option for end-users to protect their privacy in ways they previously could not. Users who don't know the ins and outs of VPNs, people who aren't as well versed with technology as us. THAT is who this benefits the most. They went from having nothing to now potentially something.

I also don't buy the whole "well your data might not be shared with X anymore but you're trusting Apple with it". What's the point? Anyone who uses literally any other major operating system is going to deal with the same thing. And the alternative? Android? Unless you want to switch to an indie fork of Android then the telemetry is much worse.

They build the operating system and the firmware, and design the CPUs. Maybe possibly protecting against some hypothetical future problem vs a real problem that exists today is not a good trade off.

If you're using an iPhone, you already are trusting Apple to not do scummy things. If they wanted to, they could snoop all your traffic with or without Private Relay.

What Private Relay does appear to do is guarantee that no one besides Apple can do scummy things. That's a definite improvement.

Private Relay prevents everyone, including Apple, from snooping your traffic - assuming it behaves as they document it. Given the protocol appears to be designed expressly to shield traffic from spying by Apple and their partners, it seems reasonable to assume that they're being honest.

Agreed, I was just saying that even if you mistrust Apple completely it's still a net gain.

Apple at least documents and gets a third party to audit and attest to the effectiveness of their controls. It’s not perfect - I’m not convinced zero trust exists - but it’s a lot better than the alternative which is nakedly disclosing unlimited use of private information for commercial purposes.

As long as you allow a vendor to deliver software updates, zero trust is impossible to achieve.

Boo hoo.

So people who sell a service and engage in surveillance to extract money through some other means are upset because another company is selling a service that provides a documented feature that prevents said surveillance.

Why wouldn’t that argument apply to normal VPN? Wouldn’t the mobile carrier be able to provide a spectrum of value-added services if they understood how my employees work? For example, if they were able to see that my accounts payable folks were recording information in SharePoint forms, they could offer a forms solution that was more efficient!

The National Association of Foxes is really upset that a company dares selling (slightly more) secure henhouses.

Except it's my belief that Apple is doing this so that THEY are the ones collecting and using this data, under the guises of privacy.

See also getting into Ads after kneecapping the competition.

The entitlement of companies that make money on surveillance is staggering.

There is no world where I want my ISP to have access to information about my content viewing habits. Why is this not an opt-in?

Good. Anything that gets complaints worded that way from companies that I am paying for a service that has nothing to do with watching my traffic and injecting ads into it without my permission sounds good to me.

It's not clear to me what data they are talking about? They talk about things like Apple TV and users content viewing habits but what info does an ISP even have about that other that things like time, data usage, what IP they connect to, etc? The really valuable things like what kind of content the users are watching is encrypted by TLS.

Seems like a really silly statement to me.

I'm not a huge Apple fan, but I totally agree. Private Relay has its faults, but it seems poised to push back against commercial mass surveillance, in a way that niche usage of VPNs simply cannot dent. Now website operators have to ask themselves "Do I really want to hassle normies using iPhones with CAPTCHAs?". Traditionally, VPN/TOR users just bear that bullshit and pray websites do not alter the deal any further. But the mass market won't stand for that.

Long term we've yet to see what the evolution will end up being (Apple could publish a list of their exit nodes for websites to whitelist, causing Mullvad et al to be left out in the cold), but for now I'm cautiously optimistic.

It really sucks when someone thinks they may have been phished an you need to review login logs to assess things. VPNs suck too, but it’s easy to tell people not to use them for business connections. Something from Apple will be marketed as being amazing even if it’s a net negative for some users.

The exit nodes are published, mostly to get incorporated into geo-ip tables.

> poised to push back against commercial mass surveillance

By consolidating all surveillance to Apple?

For one, consolidation into just Apple is better than both websites and ISPs getting the surveillance data. People can also voluntarily choose to use Private Relay, whereas they can't generally make that choice for their last mile ISP (oligopoly) nor for the common surveillance systems that are used across websites (eg CAPTCHAs).

For two, by hopefully making usage of VPNs more palatable to sites that are currently harassing what they perceive as the small segment of VPN users with blocks and CAPTCHAs.

I admit that #2 is hopeful, and that we might just end up with those sites whitelisting Apple while continuing to hassle everyone else that wants to hide their IP. But I'd prefer to hope for now.

Obviously the real long term answer is the development and adoption of secure protocols instead of centrally-named and centrally-served HTTPS/DNS, but that's orthogonal.

> It's not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line.

Your comment ends with:

> I appreciate that and it contributes to my overall respect for the company and its approach.

Seems like a straightforward connection: Apple provides the feature → your trust in them increases[1] → you continue to buy from them and recommend them to other people.

[1]: Especially relevant at a time where distrust of big tech companies is rising.

This. I don't think people understand that some Apple initiatives are driven by their values and a desire to do something good for the user. Also, this is part of a paid iCloud plan anyway, so it encourages people to pay for iCloud.

> It's not obvious that it immediately helps their bottom line.

Besides requiring a paid iCloud+ subscription?

...which did not have this feature beforehand (nor the email anonymization) and did not increase in price from a dollar a month.

That's what iCloud 50GB cost in 2015, and they introduced these new features in 2021.

Likely possible due to falling capex/opex costs for the storage, but still...they added multiple new features and didn't increase the price, even after a fairly substantial amount of inflation over those five to six years.

I'm not sure what the argument is supposed to be here. Apple adds features to its hardware without raising the price. As a software developer, I add features to my software without raising the price. The point is to make the product more enticing so that more potential customers will buy it.

If Apple wasn't trying to sell iCloud+ then it would have made iCloud Private Relay available to all Apple users without iCloud+.

Apple is not a charity. This is sales 101.

They're the _least_ charitable, I'd say. Apples marketing is trying to push generous, kind, etc because it shifts the overton window about the companies main objective which from the outside appears to be make computers into appliances that you replace every year.

Which would be fine if there marketing wasn't so effective. As it stands, they're an existential risk to the freedom we all currently enjoy in computing. And the environmental impact of pure disposable consumption devices is the kind of thing journalists will be talking about in 30 years - like oil and gas.

And like oil and gas, they're very powerful and have great marketing.

Hundreds of thousands of developers use Macs every day to produce both content and software. And the Internet is still open to you (in most countries, at least) to add your own service or website.

Also, technology has advanced so much in the past 15 years that people are replacing their Apple devices significantly less frequently than they used to.

Yep! Can even do some stuff with iOS too. But its not open so you can't do anything. Which is the promise of computers. Not to do what Apple deems OK, but whatever a childs mind (or any mind) can dream of. Its not OK to teach kids that they can't use the things they own how they see fit. It's teaching them to think inside a box of Apple, or Googles choosing. It is sort of disgusting.

What “anything” are you speaking of? If people couldn’t do anything with their devices, they probably wouldn’t buy them!

How about write software themselves on their devices and share it with their friends for starters? You know without paying a tithe to Apple. That'd go a long way.

> Also, technology has advanced so much in the past 15 years that people are replacing their Apple devices significantly less frequently than they used to.

Not sure about that. We have annual OS updates with force obsolescence via termination of device support and security updates. (Even the "supported" N-2 versions of macOS don't get all the security updates of the latest version.)

And the devices now all have batteries that aren't user-replaceable.

With the 2 year phone carrier contracts, the financial incentive was actually to upgrade your phone every 2 years. Those are mostly gone now, but it's rumored that Apple is working on a new hardware subscription.

The termination of device support tends to be for devices that are 7+ years old. That’s quite a reasonable support lifetime. A lot of commercial software support has a similar or shorter term.

Also, as of today, battery replacements for all supported iPhone devices costs less than $70. That’s a very good price and basically includes the labor for free. Nobody is getting ripped off here.

> Even the "supported" N-2 versions of macOS don't get all the security updates of the latest version.

If it’s supported, it’s getting security updates, period. Here is an example of a recent security update for Catalina: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2089?locale=en_US

> The termination of device support tends to be for devices that are 7+ years old. That’s quite a reasonable support lifetime.

I disagree. My 2014 MacBook Pro still works perfectly fine, but it doesn't run Monterey, which I need for work purposes, so I had to buy a new MacBook Pro. I certainly didn't want to drop all that money right now.

> Also, as of today, battery replacements for all supported iPhone devices costs less than $70. That’s a very good price and basically includes the labor for free. Nobody is getting ripped off here.

I've had to replace the battery twice out of warranty on my 2014 MacBook Pro, and it cost more than $70. Moreover, the pandemic has made getting repairs significantly more difficult. Who wants to ship their device off and be without it?

> If it’s supported, it’s getting security updates, period. If you have contrary evidence, I’d like to see it.

I said they don't get all the security updates; I didn't say they get no security updates.

This differential in vulnerability patching is very well known among Mac security researchers. For example: https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/apples-poor-patchin... users-security-and-privacy-precarious/

> which I need for work purposes, so I had to buy a new MacBook Pro. I certainly didn't want to drop all that money right now.

I can sympathize with being frugal. That said, if you're buying a laptop for work, I recommend both financing it and depreciating it on your taxes, if that's an option for you. It's a cost of doing business, and many tax codes treat computers as depreciable assets. In fact, in the U.S., the tax code has a 5-year depreciation schedule for computers - less than the support lifetime.

As for the security updates question, if you have information that Catalina is lacking a critical security update, I'm sure Apple would like to know about it and fix it. They care a lot about this stuff. The article you posted complains about a lack of transparency as to the "why" certain patches aren't backported, but it doesn't declare that there are active security vulnerabilities in those versions, either.

I too laud Apple for their efforts, but I view them as a benevolent dictator.

To me it’s obvious how this helps their bottom line: people are very interested in privacy and willing to pay top dollar for it. Every time I turn on an additional privacy service from Apple, I feel their grip tightening on my digital identity as they push themselves even more between me and the direct relationships I have with other websites.

iCloud private relay, email aliases, and “Sign in with Apple” is their final act to completely dominate the relationship between their users and other web applications.

I’m not bitter about it, but I do think it’s helpful and healthier to view Apple in this way and not mistake their efforts as altruistic. They’re simply a company trying to develop a profitable, high retention service… and they’re doing a damn good job at it.

Glad that it is not altruistic. Much more better served with other incentives

The lock-in makes it impossible for me to use most of their services though. I need to access all my stuff on Mac but also on Windows and Linux.

I wish there was a good privacy-embracing cloud platform that I could just pay for directly instead of via buying hardware as Apple does.

iCloud private relay is a great idea but I need it on all my computers and phones. I use Firefox now but their VPN option doesn't hold a candle to what Apple offers with icloud relay. It's really a different thing altogether.

> iCloud private relay is a great idea but I need it on all my computers and phones.

Why? Why not just use a different VPN/Proxy service? A lot of apple features are available elsewhere like Sign-in-with-apple.

What's even worse is that a lot of their privacy and security features are designed to interact within the walled garden instead of purely security and privacy by default. Talk to another Apple user? Everything fine. Talk to an Android user, no more privacy and security. And good luck sending a video that doesn't look like it was filmed with a literal potato.

Why is it apple's responsibility to worry about Android?

Because a lot of their mac users have android phones.

Same argument for windows...a lot of iOS users run windows.

Windows only cares about iOS and Android because windows phone died.

Apple has no incentive to actively support android hardware.

Services however makes sense and courting Android is a good strategy.

Because I, an Apple user, would like to securely communicate with my Android-using family member. Security benefits both sides of the conversation. But since Apple doesn’t support it, I have to use a completely different service.

Because not everyone you talk to has an Apple device?

Despite their take on privacy, I'd not be surprised if Apple also purchased a tonne of user data from brokers, however.

At the end of the day, they are a very successful business that serves its own bottom line. The privacy angle for the mobile and browser ecosystem, in my eyes, is nothing but market positioning (as more or less anti-Android and anti-Chrome) even if they are engineering novel solutions such as the Private Relay.

If they really cared, they wouldn't be in bed with Google for their search deal, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-s...

The average people associates search with Google — they would lose more by not providing it

If you’re reliant on their email services you’re less likely to cancel iCloud or switch mobile platforms.

Beware of using private relay with Apple Mail (at least on macOS). You currently can't both use private relay AND disable automatic remote content loading, so looking at a spam message will immediately load all pictures, and you will be spammed to oblivion. The spammer won't know your IP but that's little comfort, you're now a top spot on their list.

At least on iOS, Mail Privacy Protection is designed to load all resources immediately upon receiving the email, not when viewing it.

Maybe this still indicates the email is valid to a spammer, but it wouldn’t show that you opened it (unlike i.e. Gmail’s image proxy, which only loads upon viewing.)

https://www.litmus.com/blog/apple-mail-privacy-protection-fo...

You should be able to do this (although not immediately obvious) by:

- Opening Mail, Preferences, and going to the Privacy tab. - Unchecking "protect mail activity" - Checking "hide IP address" - Checking "block all remote content"

Now you have automatic remote content loading disabled, and have private relay enabled. You would need to test this with a "friendly" bit of remote content to be certain, but it seems to work.

When doing this, also ensure you have limit IP tracking enabled on your ethernet or wifi network, as that appears to override this setting (based on the help content which is available in this tab).

It’s important to note you actually have a choice to use Apple products or not, or even use this relay or another. In many places in the US you have barely any choices for your ISP which could be tracking you and selling your data.

This is great in that it gives everyday folks a stupid-simple protection from ISP and mobile service providers.

And yes, of course Apple did it as another reason to sell next tier iCloud service and gain good will of folks, which I think is a much better trade off then ISPs and Sprint/Verizon/etc knowing your full browser history.

It used to work great last year, then all of a sudden it stopped working due to "regional laws", killing the whole purpose of it.

I don't get it as VPNs or proxies aren't illegal where I live, how is Apple's private relay not available?

Probably whoever is responsible for it doesn’t really want to put up a fight. VPNs are always kind of in a gray area which many small companies could deal with (or say f it) but Apple can’t or doesn’t find it to be worth the fight.

VPS are a digital product while Apple has physical stores or resellers of physical products in these countries. It’s not as easy.

I don’t have a Facebook account but sometimes I got an fb link for a public meme or a video and for the past month it’s been 50/50 (seeing the resource or getting blocked by Ip)

It’s fully blocked from commenting on 4chan too.

Private Relay is a fantastic feature, definitely one of the better ones Apple has rolled out over the past couple years.

iCloud private relay currently has at least 2 providers (Cloudflare and Akamai); there may be more in other regions.

Cloudflare has a good blog post about this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/icloud-private-relay/

Fastly as well -- Fastly, Cloudflare, and Akamai are the three egress providers.

This is about centralisation of user data through Apple's servers under the garb of "privacy". When will the HN community wake up and start calling Apple for what it is?

When will HN users learn to not write overly confident “facts” when they are not, in fact, knowledgeable enough on the topic?

I am blocking ads via my router DNS. When using Private Relay I see the ads again, which is makes using apps very annoying.

Plus, I dont see any benefit of hiding my network traffic here in Germany, tbh.

The DNS issue is intentional. Trackers have collected information about people using VPNs before by generating unique domain lookups for a visit and watching where the DNS query originates from.

Theoretically, editing your hosts file might provide the same filters even with Apple's pseudo-TOR enabled if the system respects user preferences. That might be a challenge on iOS, though.

One reason that might not affect you is that piracy is heavily prosecuted in Germany

This is limited to Safari though, so completely useless for piracy.

No, a lot of online streaming sites started using BitTorrent in the background to stream the video, and a lot of people got fined in Germany because of this

can you kindly share the source?

No? A lot of anime sites. Google it

dnscrypt-proxy works fine with Private Relay.

I recommend using something like NextDNS, DNSCloak or Blockada: - Local VPN Apps like Lockdown can block DoT but not DoH - Manual DNS settings don't block DoH or DoT. AFAIK you need an app with specific entitlements? Maybe someone can clarify this? - Private Relay works as expected

I am using NextDNS on all iOS devices and it works great. Get yourself an account and configure it to your needs. Don't forget to enable the block site instead of 0.0.0.0., then download their CA and trust it.

Two interesting side effects, if I understand correctly:

1. Dramatically reduces the number of entities the government needs to "partner" with (via NSLs and/or TAO) for the firehose of domains visited by Apple users.

2. Apple gets a time series of Safari network traffic for each user

I wonder how many popular domains could be unmasked by an ISP that is supposedly blind to the destination of each packet but can of course still see fine-grained traffic patterns for each user.

(1) Private Relay encrypts the request, so the host that can identify the client cannot read the request. The host that can decrypt the request cannot identify the client. So without making a total change to how it works it's not it by design cannot be used for surveillance.

(2) Again, by design Apple cannot see what is being requested, so no it doesn't get a time series of safari traffic. If that were a real concern that you had, then recall the Apple could just have Safari report those directly, without having to have any VPN-type insanity.

The text that is important is, it would seem very hard for Apple to say this is if was not true: "This information could be used to determine your identity and build a profile of your location and browsing history over time. iCloud Private Relay is designed to protect your privacy by ensuring that when you browse the web in Safari, no single party—not even Apple—can see both who you are and what sites you're visiting."

One thing that is pretty cool is that it will proxy a IPv4 connection to IPv6. I was surprised to see a IPv6 address when I searched for “what is my ip” in Google.

is it possible to DIY something like this, and is it worth the hassle?

my thought was 2 VPS and use Wireguard multihop. VPS 0 connected from my home router, VPS 1 connected to VPS 0 via private networking (ideally in a different geo location). recycle VPS 1 IP/location periodically.

VPN from mobile to home router and get the benefits on the go, with dnsmasq blocking ad hosts in VPS 1 so tracking crap ideally doesn't make it over the wire. thoughts?

I have a VPN travel router with a Mullvad .OVPN profile added. This 'VPN-ifies' all my traffic. Then I have a VPN app I use on my device from another VPN provider (ProtonVPN). This is chaining two distinct VPN providers on top of each other, a form of onion routing. Does it make me 'more' private? Hardly, but it's a good first step.

But with your setup, the 2 VPS are still traceable to you (ie. via payment information). You can go through some extra effort to avoid this (eg. buying the VPS over tor and paying using crypto), but I'm guessing you're not currently doing this. Moreover, the 2 VPS are still carrying only your traffic, which makes logging/correlation attacks easier. With apple's solution, your traffic is mixed with others, and the second hop has no idea who you are.

Various sites are punishing me for using this. Amazon and eBay both seem to massively dislike it and demand I click an email link.

Good feature, although a bit slow for me in a major metro.

It doesn't work with VPN apparently (that's what it told me when I tried). That's not going to cut it for me. There are other ways that don't have that restriction.

Turn it off and use Mulvad

Came here to say that. Using a VPN combined with Private Relay is overkill and adds latency too.

It doesn’t work as well. Apple disables private relay when it detects a vpn enabled.

The thing is… if you already pay for iCloud storage, this is thrown in for free. Plus it doesn’t feel like it’s via a VPN when using my 1Gbps fibre in Singapore. On Mulvad it does, unfortunately.

Only works with Safari on macOS, which means I’ll never use it there. And I wound up turning it off on iOS because it made my life more annoying - go into the subway and try to connect to the free MTA WiFi? Alert! Your browsing is unprotected.

…plus I found I would sporadically get connection issues that I resolved by turning it off.

It’s a bummer because I would like to use it, and it being bundled with iCloud is nice.

No Google suggestions for me in iOS Safari when using Private Relay.

> go into the subway and try to connect to the free MTA WiFi? Alert! Your browsing is unprotected.

I haven't used it myself, but it seems reasonable to inform laymen that browsing to a captive portal system will be unprotected. I'm not sure how eggregious the error actually is.

> …plus I found I would sporadically get connection issues that I resolved by turning it off.

Not defending Apple in particular, but connectivity will decrease with every extra hop you make in your connection; you'll notice this when browsing the internet with tor (or, heaven forbid trying to use IRC over tor).

it makes sense that you would have more connectivity issues when using any kind of proxy; and it would get worse with every extra layer of proxy.

Not sure what “connectivity will decrease” means in practice, but I’d see problems like pages refusing to load over multiple refreshes, texts not sending, or iCloud data (messages, photos, etc) simply not updating until I switched the service off.

I’m not as convinced as you that these problems are inherent to the service, and I’m holding out hope for what Private Relay looks like when it emerges from beta.

> I'm not sure how eggregious the error actually is

Not egregious - annoying. Unusual for Apple. I don’t want to use a service that spits alerts at me as I walk around the city.

The connection issues don’t happen anymore. It was annoying before where things would just hang and then turning off and on would fix it. I haven’t seen that in months, so they must have fixed the issue.

Nice! I'll give it another shot.

I love it! Using this I’ve seen FB/Google having less and less information about my exact location. Seeing less relevant ads is assuring and relieving! The only wish I have is a more fluent way to enable/disable this and having an app for other platforms.

Google Fi also has a VPN solution if you use them. Some ads are definitely as if I'm in another state. The weird one is shopping sites (like Home Depot) try to guess my closest store and they are always wildly off. It's sorta funny.

The weirder thing is that even after I login, Home Depot (and Best Buy and Staples) show me the wrong preferred store. I already saved what store I want, plus I have my home address saved (and it is the only address), yet they cannot remember or figure out my preferred store. And they have my purchase history for where I have already purchased things a million times, in recent history.

What is all this data good for?

One explanation is that the ads/marketing is managed by a completely different "silo" in the business than the website itself. It may even be outsourced to a separate company.

When it comes to ads/marketing, it is good enough to make others believe they are driving sales/conversions - whether it actually does is irrelevant as long as everyone believes it does and keeps pouring money into it.

God this is so annoying. I had chalked it up to bad big-box software engineering software but now I realize it’s private relay. Hmm…

Also Google One, which doesn't require using Fi.

https://one.google.com/about/vpn

Just remember that now instead of your ISP knowing every site you visit, Apple now will.

So where as in the olden days, in order to figure out who you were, some actor had to buy logs from the destination sites and from the ISPs, then correlate.

Now they can just buy the information from Apple. How convenient for Apple.

I know Apple says they will only share your information with trusted partners and only with your consent which is implicit when you use private relay. No one ever asks who these partners are though. Probably the same people that used to buy your data from the destination sites and ISPs...

…did you read the article?

Have you read Apple's privacy policy?

The article specifically mentions that the Apple relay wouldn't see the DNS, whereas the second relay doesn't see your IP.

Secondly, Apple makes the OS. If they wanted to spy on you, they could have done so in much easier ways already.

This is the point - Apple doesn't have that information either. From the article, in the "How Private Relay works" section:

> when you browse the web in Safari, no single party — not even Apple — can see both who you are and what sites you're visiting.

agree - apple says they're doing this for "privacy" but there is no way to verify they are not tracking/storing this data themselves. in todays world its simply too valuable and apples tentacles are far too reaching for the data to be thrown out. in fact, there are reports of an increased advertising push already [0].

id wager there is an internal team analyzing this data for predictive trends across all their product lines, akin to facebook using onavo data to target and value whatsapp relative to messenger.

it could be used to guide which new streaming series candidate gets more funding/marketing, popular colors for new iPhones, price elasticity across the range, etc.

and of course the surveillance aspect always looms in the background.

[0] - https://www.macrumors.com/2022/05/09/apple-services-push-str...

There was no way to verify before that Apple wasn’t tracking you either. Whether or not you trust Apple should have nothing to do with Private Relay.

you're missing the whole point of private relay

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