Apple’s new ‘private relay’ VPN will be available in Hong Kong, not mainland China, source says

Apple’s ‘private relay’ feature for iCloud, which hides users’ browsing data even from the company itself, will be available in Hong Kong, not mainland China

The feature, expected to roll out later this year, is one of multiple new privacy protections Apple unveiled at its developer conference on Monday

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Apple CEO Tim Cook previews new privacy protections at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, on June 7. A new VPN feature called “private relay” that masks users’ IP addresses and browsing activity will not be available in China, among other countries. Photo: AFP

Published: 10:05am, 8 Jun 2021Updated: 7:30pm, 8 Jun 2021

Apple Inc’s new “private relay” feature, designed to obscure a user’s web browsing behaviour from internet service providers and advertisers will not be available in mainland China but will be available in Hong Kong, a person close to the situation told the Post on Tuesday.

The feature was one of a number of privacy protections Apple announced at its annual software developer conference on Monday, the latest in a years-long effort by the company to cut down on the tracking of its users by advertisers and to offer its customers greater data privacy.

Aside mainland China, for regulatory reasons it also will not be available in Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines, Apple said.

The “private relay” feature first sends web traffic to a server maintained by Apple, where it is stripped of a piece of information called an IP address. From there, Apple sends the traffic to a second server maintained by a third-party operator who assigns the user a temporary IP address and sends the traffic onward to its destination website.

The use of an outside party in the second hop of the relay system is intentional, Apple said, to prevent even Apple from knowing both the user’s identity and what website the user is visiting.

Apple has not yet disclosed which outside partners it will use in the system but said it plans to name them in the future. The feature likely will not become available to the public until later this year.

IP addresses can be used to track users in a variety of ways, including as a key ingredient in “fingerprinting,” a practice in which advertisers string together disparate data to deduce a user’s identity. Both Apple and Alphabet Inc’s Google prohibit this.