I’m jotting down a few things I’ve learned about Apple’s iCloud Private Relay network service and the implications of using it for having parental controls or other network allow/block settings in place.
What is iCloud Private Relay?
Apple describes iCloud Private Relay as a privacy-protecting service that hides the IP address and network activity (DNS lookups, sites visited, etc.) of an Apple device.
So, it’s basically a proxy service that forces all network traffic through a new connection, although Apple has taken steps to ensure it’s not as simple as “now Apple sees everything instead of your ISP”. You can read an article from Cloudflare about their role in providing the separated ingress and egress proxy setup that ostensibly ensures no one company has all of the details about what you’re doing in a private relay browsing session.
I think Apple introduced the service in 2022, and in many cases I think it was just turned on by default for a lot of devices/browsers.
How do you use it or turn it off?
While Apple offers some UI settings that imply you can disable iCloud Private Relay, I’ve found it’s not that simple and that Apple’s presentation of the service can be misleading at times.
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