Hi, I was just wondering what are your thoughts about Apple’s iCloud Private relay? Primarily to block tracking over the internet? Is it good enough for a normal user?.
Thank you!
Private relay works well enough but it’s only in Safari and Mail I believe. They should expand it to cover the entire OS
iCloud Private Relay is fine.
However, I prefer to use NextDNS, which blocks ads, trackers, and telemetry at the DNS level.
I like it, it works well for regular use.
Only works for some of Apple walled garden usages. Useless.
Private relay does not really help with tracking at all.
All it does is obfuscating your IP and encrypting unencrypted traffic (which shouldn’t often happen anymore anyway).
It’s pretty much a proxy and that’s about it.
Does it help to protect you? It depends. If you feel like you want to hide your IP (which might be a good thing), it’s an easy and quick alternative to proxies or vpns.
But always keep in mind that it’s a third party that reroutes your traffic. So technically they could spoof information, modify your requests, collect data, etc - especially when not using encrypted connections (I.e. https site calls)
What does iCloud private relay do? I’ve been avoiding using android for quite some time so I’m a bit out of the loop.
it’s not nearly sufficient to block tracking.
private relay hides 2 things – your ip address from services you use, and your dns lookups from your ISP.
whereas most “tracking” is in the form of browser fingerprinting and cookies. once you’ve solved that problem, then you can think about your ip address and DNS situation.
I would go with something like AdGuard for blocking trackers. That or a full VPN depending on how private you want things to be. I have iCloud private relay turned on as a fallback, but I really can’t gauge how effective it is. I just have to go on Apple’s word that it’s lessening the accuracy of trackers that try to correlate that information. With that, Apple themselves don’t even claim it to be any measure of an improvement over competing products like VPNs or Adblock. I’m not saying not to use it, but I don’t place a great deal of trust in private relay personally
It’s better than nothing.
But solutions like NextDNS, AdGuard, PiHole, etc, are way more powerful and reliable.
Also selectively covers unencrypted traffic from other apps.
Why would someone use this instead of a VPN? Where does it fit into using a VPN…as in should I use both or one or the other?
They haven’t updated their app in 3 years though which is concerning
Apple sure did put a lot of effort into providing a whole lot of “not very much” to their users, too. It works so hard to accurately keep geolocating you that it practically undoes all its benefits.
It’s not on Android, iPhone only.
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Well, if you already have access to this, you can save yourself the expense of buying a VPN.
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I’d imagine that eventually many sites will stop harassing individuals coming from apple’s relays because there are just so many of them. For example, whenever I use a regular VPN, Google wants me to fill out a Captcha all the time. I rarely see it with private relay. I don’t think Google wants to harass Apple users and drive them away just because they are using an apple feature.
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If for some reason, you only want to send your web browsing data over the relay from your phone, I think this is the only way to do it. Regular VPN will send all traffic from your phone through a relay.
For me, it doesn’t replace a VPN, but I also don’t run with a VPN on 100% of the time. But I do leave my private relay on all the time because I’m sick of being harvested.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/icloud-private-relay/
This is the best explanation without getting too deep.
see no need for an app lol