NEWS
Apple’s two-proxy system makes it very difficult for any one
company to build a profile of your web activity.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 the sites 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 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 the
BBC iPlayer 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 job of preventing profiling of
your web activity based on your basic
connection data. But it has a lot of
shortcomings compared to a real VPN.
Some of these include:- It only works with Safari, not any
of the other apps or web browsers
you use. Technically, some other
DNS information and a small subset
of app-related web traffic will use
it, but it’s best to think of it as a
Safari-only thing. - It’s easily identifiable as a ‘proxy
server’, which many large networks
like those at schools or businesses
will not work with. Most good VPNs
disguise themselves to look like