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Comment by socalgal2 | Hacker News Reader

I keep wishing “privacy” company, Apple, would release a VPN such that no business would be able to block it as they’d lose too many customers

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They kinda do on Apple Private relay and most services don't block it. Funny thing if you put it in your router and point the tunnel to a certain country is a good way to source address launder since the endpoint will just think its an apple private relay user from local country.

Tradeoff is that it seems to be a browser only thing. Some tools like the default macOS curl seem to be integrated with it.

Unless Apple would make an anonymizing VPN connection mandatory, I don't see any difference to the situation as is. As long as people can be pressured to turn off the VPN, nobody loses any customers. Additionally, I don't think paying customers are the target, since they usually provide identifying information anyway.

If Apple started routing all iPhone/Mac traffic through some anonymizing VPN by default, services that block it would absolutely lose lots of customers.

Yes, but Apple wouldn't do this, because Apple is also at risk of losing customers when people get blocked by network security at work. We could also fantasize about Apple fighting all the tracking everywhere, including their own services...

Quite frankly, it's a bit silly to paint Apple as some privacy fortress, who wouldn't have to comply with law enforcement/intelligence to unmask/tap traffic. I mean, for a lot of people VPN choice is done considering legal jurisdictions somewhere far away. Apple could/would never possibly offer this level of protection.

> when people get blocked by network security at work

There were also plenty of corp-ware in existence that had Flash as *absolutely mandatory*.

It's a matter of numbers.

If 20% of people are using VPNs, blocking them is going to be a double-digit hit.

I don't think mandating that all traffic on Apple devices must be routed through their servers would be that great for privacy.

Agreed. Though for reference, Apple's private relay has an architecture that makes it much more privacy preserving than most VPNs.

Traffic is sent through two independent relays: Apple sees your IP but not the destination, while a 3rd party egress partner sees the destination but not your IP, with encryption preventing either side from correlating both ends. It's some of the benefits of Tor. But of course you still need to put a lot of faith in Apple's implementation, which is the hardest part.

It sucks that we need rely on a big company to make a big, scaled-up change like that in order to move the needle. This looks like a pretty fatal flaw in the design of TCP/IP. IPs should be randomized periodically and they should all be equal. You shouldn't be able to tell someone's country from them, let alone their city, ISP, whether it's coming from a business or somewhere residential, whether they are a bot or a human. The Internet shouldn't have boundaries like this, and the fact that it still does shows there's still work to do.

They… do?

This comment would be more useful if you have the name of the product or linked to it. I’m also not aware of this offering and wasn’t able to find information on it.

iCloud Private Relay (at least for Safari).

iCloud Private Relay

It's a very limited VPN as it only works for Safari/Mail and only anonymizes you to your region/country.

Private relay is an Apple VPN-like service that only covers iOS safari. That means the SoundCloud app or desktop usage will not receive any privacy benefits.

Private Relay also works in macOS Safari.

Just tested Soundcloud with a PWA using iOS Safari and Private Relay enabled. It works fine, albeit a few annoying popups asking to download the app.

They’re not big enough and some sites will hard block it with other VPNs, like the government of Delaware. Bigger sites still soft block it like Instagram which will randomly ban accounts using it, or Google with captchas every couple of searches.

Apple, parading as paragons of privacy, also allow companies like Facebook etc. to track you across reinstalls and EVEN DEVICE RESETS and NEW DEVICES through the iCloud Keychain API.

This shit has been going on for maybe 5 years but no one seems to know or care.

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