AUGUST 2021 MACWORLD 105Apple’s two-proxy system makes it very difficult for any one company to build a profile of your
web activity.
picture of both who you are and where
you’re going.
The website you’re visiting typically
gets your exact IP address and DNS
request, so it can easily build a pretty
detailed profile of exactly who you are,
where you are, and where you’re going
online. Combine that with a few cookies,
even innocuous-seeming ones, and it’s
pretty simple to have your entire online
activity profiled, tracked, traced, and sold
to advertisers (and others).
What iCloud Private Relay does is
make the websites you’re visiting totally
ignorant of this information, so it can’t build
profiles of your activity.
The IP addresses Apple uses in place of
your real one are still roughly approximate
to your general area; it’s not enough to
identify you personally, but it will allow sites
that use your IP address to deliver local
news, weather, sports, or other info to keep
working fine. There’s an option to use an
even broader IP address, but it might make
some of those sites work incorrectly.
Note that Apple does not allow you to
choose an IP address or even a region,
and won’t ever make it seem like you’re
coming from a totally different place. In
other words, if you want to use it to access
geographically locked content in Netflix or
other online services, you’re out of luck.HOW IS iCLOUD PRIVATE
RELAY DIFFERENT FROM
A VPN?
As cool as this Private Relay feature is,
it’s definitely not a VPN. It will do a great