American electronics company Apple launches ‘Private Relay’, a new service that ensures that all internet traffic coming from your Apple device is encrypted and invisible to third parties. Several countries, including China, will not be able to enjoy the new privacy options.
On Monday, the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the annual conference for software developers organized by Apple, took place. The company announced the new service called iCloud+. One of the features included in it is ‘Private Relay’.
Virtual fingerprint
That feature encrypts internet traffic on Apple devices, meaning that no one in the path between user and website can access sent and received data.
How does Apple’s Private Relay work? Requests from the Internet user are forwarded through two separate ‘Internet relays’. When someone surfs the Internet with Safari, his or her data is sent through two separate servers to mask the user’s identity and which websites they visit. As a result, even Apple or the user’s carrier cannot see that data.
The Private Relay feature first sends the web traffic to an Apple server, where it is stripped of its IP address (virtual fingerprint). From there, Apple forwards the traffic to a second server operated by a third party, which assigns the user a temporary IP address and forwards the traffic to the destination website.
The US tech giant will thus use a third party for the Private Relay function. The company has not yet disclosed which third-party partners it will use in the system. The feature will likely not be available to the public until later this year.
The new privacy feature is somewhat like a VPN, a virtual private network. In addition, users can route their Internet traffic through a server elsewhere in the world to hide their browsing activities.
Not for China, Belarus…
Several countries, which do not take the privacy of their citizens very seriously, will not be able to access Privacy Relay. China, one of the most important markets for Apple, is one of those countries. The same goes for Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines, Apple told news agency Reuters.
Apple said it couldn’t offer the feature in these countries due to local laws. In 2017, the company also removed a number of VPN services from its China App Store to comply with local regulations.
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