Hi everyone. I’m mostly new to online privacy but doing my best to get started. I have iCloud+ and recently learned that iCloud Private Relay has been automatically turned on for me; I know that not using Apple or Apple products would probably be for the best, but this is where I’m at right now. I also learned that Private Relay is supposed to hide your Safari browsing activity from your ISP, including your phone carrier, but I was wondering if this is applicable to public wifi, such as wifi offered by libraries, parks, cafes, or retail stores? Or that it should, theoretically, if the program doesn’t fail, be applicable. I’m not sure if there’s any real difference between personal, private wifi, and public wifi, which is why I was wondering. Thank you!
Private relay only (kinda) hides your IP from the websites you visit, your ISP can still see everything
I know that not using Apple or Apple products would probably be for the best
I don’t know where this comes from but whoever makes such general claims probably only has strong believes and no strong arguments.
Private Relay is perfectly fine for protecting web traffic on a public Wi-Fi network but what it won’t do that a VPN will is protect any app traffic.
That said it’s also ridiculously easy to get burned by a VPN if the VPN provider is untrustworthy so use caution there too.
No they can’t. All your ISP sees is encrypted traffic going to an Apple relay server.
The catch is that Private Relay only protects Safari browsing traffic and not other app traffic.
This is unrelated to the post
Thank you for the response. I have been considering a VPN for my phone, but I’ve stopped using public wifi as often as before, so I wasn’t sure if it would be necessary, or if I could simply rely on Private Relay. Is a VPN also generally useful for privacy from a cellular provider?
u/madeoutofkitkats to be technical I think Private Relay houses also non-https and dns queries of apps.
The ISP is unable to see the sites you visit (according to Apple’s website not even Apple can see them, but I will let you choose whether to believe that).
Even without Private Relay ISP should not see inside https sites (only which sites you contact)…
Thank you for the response. When you say encrypted traffic, do you mean that the ISP is still able to see what websites you’re visiting but not the content of them, or do they simply read to the ISP as being connected to the Apple relay server?
As always it’s about trust. You need to think about what your threat model is (what it is you’re protecting against and how sensitive you believe your data to really be) and decide who you do and don’t trust accordingly.
It’s worth remembering there are tons of extremely shady VPN providers out there and it is virtually impossible to know whether or not they are really going to make good on their promises of not logging, not selling your data etc. So the question is: do you have a specific reason to distrust the network you are connected to (i.e. your cellular provider or ISP) and if so, do you trust a VPN provider more? You will never eliminate the need for trust, all you can do is move it to a different entity, as whoever is carrying your internet traffic will be able to see metadata from your traffic.
Public Wi-Fi networks are one place where things like Private Relay and VPNs do make a bit more sense because those Wi-Fi networks are generally unencrypted (i.e. not using WPA encryption over the air). So there’s a clear advantage there to encrypting traffic as much as possible so that someone sat with a nearby laptop can’t sniff your traffic.
Finally there’s a quite thorough document that explains about how Private Relay works, so you can evaluate that too: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/iCloud_Private_Relay_Overview_Dec2021.PDF