January 2022 • Macworld 13Combine 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 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
Apple’s two-proxy system makes it very difficult for any
one company to build a profile of your web activity.