Ask HN: How’s iCloud Private Relay? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How’s iCloud Private Relay?

46 pointstiffanyh32 comments

Anyone been using iCloud Private Relay and if so, can you share how’s it’s been?

For me it's got very limited use, if at all. My primary browser is Firefox with ublock, multi-containers etc. but Private Relay won't work with it. Also, my home network has a Pi-Hole and I have to manually change my DNS to a public one if I want to enable Private Relay. So for a privacy use case, with browser fingerprinting and all, there's the tradeoff that you can hide your IP but have to give up on the Pi-Hole protection. All ads start showing up in Safari. I'd rather go with a VPN that tunnels all computer traffic except DNS. FWIW, this is my poor man's VPN with a free Google Cloud micro instance used as a socks proxy with Firefox:

  ssh user@IP -N -C -q -f -D 1234

Magic lasso on Safari has been working well for me for Adblock.

There is a command you can run to allow private relay on pi hole

I’ve had it on since it was available, and it’s almost entirely invisible except for a higher rate of captchas, some banking applications re-requiring 2FA on log in from otherwise known devices, and Twitter missing caches for my auth state and rendering some pages randomly with a logged out view.

I often see a Notification that says something like you are now using iCloud Private Relay, but no persistent indication when I’m not. Seems like an icon similar to Wi-Fi, cell or vpn should be to the right of the notch to make it easier to see status.

When it is running I don’t notice additional latency of two extra hops, and that’s in conjunction with 1Blocker filtering traffic too.

It would be awesome to see some more scientific analysis… or metrics. I’m sure lots of people are using VPN (for work) possibly with Private Relay & a blocker (or too).

It’s transparent, fast, and easy to forget it’s on. I wish Apple would place a more obvious indicator regarding its status in safari. It gets flipped off when joining a wifi network with captive portal for example. Sadly not enabled in third party apps where in my opinion is much more needed for hiding IP addresses.

Seems like a good tech for the average user to gain some privacy over navigating the web directly, but by no means a privacy tool for anybody with more serious privacy needs.

Like many Apple things, it's transparent, so you don't even remember it's working until it doesn't work. I've only had two problems:

1. I can't log in or pay a bill on att.com. That web site is such a dumpster fire anyway that I've switched to paying my bill over the phone because it's actually faster than the web site. (ATDT#927,,1,1,+++ATH)

2. Very occasionally the connection will be very slow. My ordinary throughput at home is about 400Mbps (an oddball speed, I know). Every once in a while it'll throttle down to 1Mbps for a while. Maybe a few minutes. Maybe a few hours. I expect it's due to maintenance and whatnot, since it's still a beta product.

I used it when I used Safari, and honestly thought it was great. Problem is I had a problem enabling both ad blocking and Private Relay at the same time, and I eventually opted to used AdGuard DNS instead of Private Relay.

What were you using for ad blocking that was incompatible with Private Relay? Was it a content blocker and/or external service like NextDNS?

AdGuard system-wide blocking wasn’t working, so I opted to go all in on AdGuard and turned off private relay.

1Blocker works simultaneously with private relay if you didn’t want to use adguard’s profile/vpn thing

Thanks for the tip, but 1Blocker’s In App FAQs state that certain features don’t work with private relay. I believe ad blockers work INSIDE Safari with Private Relay on, but I was looking at an OS level solution.

Have been using it. Haven’t seen any difference between using it and not.

I didn’t know it only applied to Safari to start but it’s my primary browser anyway. It would be much better if made all networking private.

Been great for me. Gets out of my way and I mostly don’t have to think about it. I’ve gone months without having an affirmative thought about it one way or another.

It’s fine. It’s one of those features where nothing happens.

Those are great examples of security done well (assuming it's actually doing something). Security implementations have such a history of getting in the way or being annoying that the end result is worse security because users turn it off or find ways around it. If the security controls are easy to use or mostly transparent to the user, it's a win-win.

It caused Google Maps to completely crash, might have something to do with Wipr being enabled at the same time. I haven't looked into it much, I just disabled Private Relay and that's that.

It's enabled on my phone though, as I rarely touch the browser there anyway.

In conjunction with 1Blocker, it slows things down a bit, and sometimes Duck Duck Go hangs. Otherwise, very happy with it

I’m glad it’s not just me — I also have issues with iCloud Private Relay and DDG. I’m using AdGuard, so this DDG problem is not specific to 1Blocker (nor to AdGuard, which I was wondering about). I’ve had the exact same problem across 3 different ISPs, as well; and I’ve recently switched from running my own local DNS cache to using NextDNS, yet the issue persists.

The problem only occurs on macOS. My iOS devices use the same AdGuard settings, and the same DNS, but iCloud Private Relay is completely reliable on that platform.

(The macOS Safari hanging issue has recently begun to affect GitHub in addition to DDG, which is unfortunate.)

Yes, also macOS only here.

Here in India, it made everything slow, my ping changed from 2ms to 140ms and speed from 300 to 10

I am seeing a difference on a new phone. But when I turned it on my old phone everything felt the same.

It is great, it's turned on and it's running in the background. I don't even notice it.

It's good. Transparent, at least as fast as my connections and helps me dodge a corp firewall.

Never notice it other than IP-based geolocation being less-accurate (works as intended).

I can’t get it to work on my home network, but that might be because I have a pi-hole.

Yeah it doesn’t want that, but annoyingly if you disable it on your WiFi (you can per network); it keeps re-enabling itself. F-ing annoying.

It’s kind of slow outside of the big markets, probably because their servers are far.

France here, for many pages I see huge slowdowns. Otherwise it’s good.

How’s it’s been: I forgot it was on. So pretty good, I guess.

Disabled in the countries that need it the most.

It’s not secure enough to provide the countries that need it most more privacy. They should look into dedicated VPNs or Tor.

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