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Comment by mojzu | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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