At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June 2021, the company announced a new iCloud+ service, available to Mac, iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users who have paid iCloud subscription plans. One of the new features of iCloud+ is “iCloud Private Relay,” which offers added security in the Safari web browser, by encrypting traffic and masking IP addresses.
If you’ve used a VPN (virtual private network) before, you might assume that this is what Apple is offering, and even some news reports have made that assumption. However, iCloud Private Relay is nothing like a VPN in a number of important ways. In this article, we’ll take a look at the key differences, and why VPN users won’t be canceling their service any time soon.
We’ll specifically compare iCloud Private Relay with Intego Privacy Protection, a full-featured VPN that works on your Mac (or Windows PC) to protect all your traffic, with every app you use.
While iCloud Private Relay is a step in the right direction for Apple, it is far from offering the complete protection that a trusted VPN service offers. Here’s why.
On June 7, 2021, Apple announced that paid subscribers to its iCloud service (i.e. those paying for extra iCloud storage) would get iCloud+, which includes some new features. One of the most notable features is called “iCloud Private Relay,” which Apple describes as follows:
iCloud Private Relay is a service that lets you connect to virtually any network and browse with Safari in an even more secure and private way. It ensures that the traffic leaving your device is encrypted so no one can intercept and read it. Then all your requests are sent through two separate internet relays. It’s designed so that no one — including Apple — can use your IP address, location, and browsing activity to create a detailed profile about you.
At first reading, it may sound like Apple is offering a VPN service of sorts—and some in the media have mistakenly referred to iCloud Private Relay as a VPN. However, note that Apple specifies that you’re only protected if you “browse with Safari,” Apple’s browser. There are a lot of other differences between Apple’s “private relay” and a VPN, as outlined in the next section of this article.
First, though, let’s summarize what Apple is offering with iCloud Private Relay.
Although Apple’s service is new, in some ways it’s similar to what a few other browsers (like Opera, for example) have been providing to their users for years now. It’s a browser-specific service, meaning that all other network traffic on your device is unprotected.
Apple’s iCloud Private Relay provides very narrow and limited coverage, and is more like a multi-hop Web proxying service. It only works within Apple’s Safari browser on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. When using it, Apple routes your Internet requests through one of the company’s own servers, then through a partner network, and then to the intended destination. More specifically, the first “hop” (the first server to which you connect when browsing in Safari with iCloud Private Relay) is under Apple’s control, and the second hop is operated by one of the third parties with which Apple has partnered (so far, Apple has been observed using Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly as partners).
At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Academic researchers found that Apple sometimes used the same partner for both hops, rather than going through an Apple server first. This defeats much of the service’s purpose of protecting your browsing privacy, because the partner network knows both your IP address and the site you’re accessing. (We discussed this on episode 257 of the Intego Mac Podcast.)
But when the service works as intended, Apple always knows the IP address of the user making the request. It also means that both Apple and its partners may have access to the actual content of Web pages you access, whenever pages load over HTTP rather than HTTPS.
A virtual private network (VPN) consists of software you install on your device that connects to a back-end service with private servers across the globe, which combined give you an encrypted connection to the Internet. VPNs offer a number of distinct advantages, including the following:
Intego Privacy Protection is Intego’s VPN for Mac. Designed for Mac users by the experts in Mac security and privacy, Intego Privacy Protection lets you use the Web—and the rest of the Internet—safely and securely. Unlike Apple’s iCloud Private Relay, which only protects traffic to and from the Safari web browser, Intego Privacy Protection encrypts and protects all the data entering and leaving your Mac.
With Intego Privacy Protection, you get access to more than 35,000 servers in over 80 countries and all 50 states, so you can choose where your protected traffic accesses the Internet.
Intego Privacy Protection also offers features including ad blocking and protection from known tracking and malware sites. And for total privacy, Intego does not store logs of your activity.
Here’s a simple comparison chart showing what’s included with Apple’s iCloud Private Relay vs. Intego Privacy Protection VPN when using your Mac.
Using a trusted VPN provides important layers of security and privacy protection that just aren’t offered by a single-browser Web proxy server or relay service.
You can get the Intego Privacy Protection VPN for your Mac today at a low price, with a 30-day money-back guarantee, by visiting this link. We hope you’ll check it out and experience all the amazing benefits that a true VPN can offer.
And, if you’re not protecting your Mac from malware yet, you should be; read about why Macs need antivirus software.
We discussed iCloud Private Relay in depth on episode 199 of the podcast:
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