Apple Says iOS 15.2 Included No Changes That Would Have Toggled iCloud Private Relay Off

[MacRumors]

iOS 15.2 did not introduce a bug that turned iCloud Private Relay off for some users, Apple said in a statement that was provided to MacRumors. The statement was in response to a T-Mobile claim that iOS 15.2 had automatically toggled the iCloud Private Relay feature off for some users.

iCloud Private Relay is an innovative internet privacy service that allows users with an iCloud+ subscription to connect to the internet and browse with Safari in a more secure and private way. We have rolled Private Relay out in beta and it's available in most countries around the world. No carrier partners have blocked their users from taking advantage of Private Relay.

No changes were made to iCloud Private Relay in iOS 15.2 that would have toggled the feature off. Users are encouraged to check their Settings to see if Private Relay is enabled on their device or for a specific network.

Apple also said that no carriers, including T-Mobile, have blocked their users from taking advantage of the iCloud Private Relay feature.

T-Mobile earlier this week was accused of disabling iCloud Private Relay for its users after some T-Mobile subscribers found that they were unable to turn on the feature. T-Mobile then released a statement that said it had discovered that the iOS 15.2 update was causing some device settings to default to the feature being toggled off, which Apple says did not happen.

T-Mobile also said that customers who have plans and features that use T-Mobile content filtering, such as parental controls, do not have access to iCloud Private Relay in order to allow these services to work as designed. It is not entirely clear why some T-Mobile subscribers were having issues, but customers who are not using content filtering should be able to use iCloud Private Relay as expected.

iCloud Private Relay can be turned off on a network by network basis, which can cause it to state that it is not working on the carrier level. If not enabled in the carrier settings on an iPhone, iCloud Private Relay won't be available for the cellular network, and the same goes for WiFi.

Apple recommends that users make sure that the Limit IP Address Tracking preference in WiFi, Cellular Data Options, or Network Settings is toggled on in order to use iCloud Private Relay, and the company has published a support document that better explains how iCloud Private Relay works, how to enable iCloud Private Relay, and what to do if a website or network does not work with the feature.

In light of the new information from Apple, T-Mobile has issued a revised statement clarifying that there were no changes made in iOS 15.2.

We wanted to update what we shared earlier. Apple doesn't change customers' settings when they update to iOS 15.2. Customers may see an error message if they previously toggled iCloud Private Relay or Limit IP Address Tracking off in their Cellular Data Options Settings. Apple has more details on their support page for this feature here.

Apple today also made changes in the iOS 15.3 beta to make it clearer what's going on when iCloud Private Relay is not working for a cellular network. The messaging now advises customers to check their cellular settings if the feature is disabled, rather than simply suggesting a carrier partner does not support it.

At least some of the confusion over T-Mobile and iCloud Private Relay may be related to the wording of the setting in the current version of iOS 15.2, which says that iCloud Private Relay is not carrier supported even if the feature is actually toggled off by the user in the cellular settings.

All three U.S. carriers yesterday confirmed that they support iCloud Private Relay, and now Apple has also made it clear that no carriers are blocking the feature.

Apple does say that there are network setups that could cause iCloud Private Relay not to work. Networks that audit traffic or perform network-based filtering will block access to Private Relay. This includes enterprise and school networks, which often have traffic monitoring policies, as well as cellular providers that are offering network-based services like Parental Controls, as is the case in T-Mobile's situation.

Article Link: Apple Says iOS 15.2 Included No Changes That Would Have Toggled iCloud Private Relay Off

 

[orbital~debris]

Rhetorical: who has the better track record of making honest statements?

 

[nutmac]

Apple also said that no carriers, including T-Mobile, have blocked their users from taking advantage of the iCloud Private Relay feature.

Talk is cheap.

Can Apple explain why I am getting this message (iOS 15.2.1, T-Mobile)?

 

[spartan1967]

Definitely made the right move not trusting T-Mobile to give my 3 mint condition XRs the $800 promised for new 13s.

Just keep the good data flowing TM and don’t try and screw with my bill.

 

[LoveTo]

Reading between the lines, I think Apple is saying that the bug wasn’t introduced in 15.2 but it was in-fact introduced in 15.1. T-Mobile just didn’t figure it out until 15.2 ?

 

[exjr_]

Talk is cheap.

Can Apple explain why I am getting this message (iOS 15.2.1, T-Mobile)?

View attachment 1943158

Is your "Limit IP Address Tracking" setting disabled?

Check under Settings -> Cellular -> Cellular Data Options. If that's off, iCloud Private Relay will not work over cellular

 

[mikeenglish]

“Apple also said that no carriers, including T-Mobile, have blocked their users from taking advantage of the iCloud Private Relay feature”

This is not true. Etisalat in Dubai Block this feature.

 

[BWhaler]

It must be exhausting for Apple to fight on every front for our privacy. It would be so easy to just fold up their tents and make a ton more money.

Apple is not perfect. Far from it. But thank heavens it is run by principled leaders who fight for us. They don’t need to—yet they do anyway. And I, for one, am thankful.

 

[antiprotest]

It must be exhausting for Apple to fight on every front for our privacy. It would be so easy to just fold up their tents and make a ton more money.

Apple is not perfect. Far from it. But thank heavens it is run by principled leaders who fight for us. They don’t need to—yet they do anyway. And I, for one, am thankful.

And then they scan your phone.

 

[antiprotest]

Rhetorical: who has the better track record of making honest statements?

T-mobile.

 

[BarredOwl]

It must be exhausting for Apple to fight on every front for our privacy. It would be so easy to just fold up their tents and make a ton more money.

Apple is not perfect. Far from it. But thank heavens it is run by principled leaders who fight for us. They don’t need to—yet they do anyway. And I, for one, am thankful.

That Kool-aid sure is sweet, yes?

 

[siddavis]

So the baton is just rolling around on the track. Who will pick it up and run?

 

[BGPL]

It must be exhausting for Apple to fight on every front for our privacy. It would be so easy to just fold up their tents and make a ton more money.

Apple is not perfect. Far from it. But thank heavens it is run by principled leaders who fight for us. They don’t need to—yet they do anyway. And I, for one, am thankful.

They don't fight for anything but profit, plain and simple. Tim et al could care less about you or anyone else. You're just a little dollar bill with legs to them.

 

[clevins]

Talk is cheap.

Can Apple explain why I am getting this message (iOS 15.2.1, T-Mobile)?

View attachment 1943158

Is Limit IP tracking on or off (under Settings, Cellular)?

 

[MallardDuck]

So I completely understand the content block service issue. My pihole prevents private relay from working (I get the 'doesn't work for this network prompt'). Anything that overrides or filters DNS is going to have issues with co-existing.

In fact, there's a bug with private relay in that case. If you restore a device from local backup that has it enabled, you can't login to icloud during the restore. you have to wait until later, re-disable private relay for that network, then authenticate (looks like the backup process doesn't save the network-specific settings).

I suspect that users had that error pop up and disabled it for a network, and then just forgot. Now was that popup because a) they used a carrier content filter, or b) the carriers were doing some strange DNS hijacking, who knows?

I do know that I've wanted to override carrier DNS for cloudflare for years, but that hasn't been possible. Still isn't, but at least with private relay i'm not going through verizon or at&t's servers.

 

[sw1tcher]

It must be exhausting for Apple to fight on every front for our privacy. It would be so easy to just fold up their tents and make a ton more money.

Apple is not perfect. Far from it. But thank heavens it is run by principled leaders who fight for us. They don’t need to—yet they do anyway. And I, for one, am thankful.

I'm going to presume you're not in China.

Could you also tell me when Apple's going to return the billions that Alphabet's been paying them to make Google the default search engine, or at least stop taking the billions and making Google the default?

Tim Cook is a hypocrite when he both takes their money and then criticizes them for what they do.

Apple's Good Intentions Often Stop at China's Borders

As pro-democracy protests continue in Hong Kong, the tech giant’s troubling relationship with an authoritarian regime has come into focus.

www.wired.com

Last October, as Facebook grappled with the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave a speech in Brussels in which he sought to distance the iPhone maker from its peers. Cook railed against the “data industrial complex,” and chastised companies like Google and Facebook for collecting personal information from users and weaponizing it against them. “This is surveillance,” he said. “This should make us very uncomfortable. It should unsettle us.”

 

[4jasontv]

The expectation for iCloud Private Relay should be the same HomeKit. It needs to work 100% of the time. When it breaks it's everyone's responsibility to fix it.

 

[scheinderrob]

and so it continues. my suspicion is on tmobile, too much previous incompetence from them.

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

So why the nasty message on it not working with my wifi hardware? Um... *Something* got tweaked. It worked fine ever since I enabled it, and then *BOOM* I get that message. Hoping it doesn't happen again. *shrug*

 

[PinkyMacGodess]

and so it continues. my suspicion is on tmobile, too much previous incompetence from them.

The message I saw was about MY wifi hardware. Oh, and mine uses AT&T. I think it was a random bug that tripped for some absurd/nebulous reason. Who knows? Apple may not know...

 

[winxmac]

Insert Spiderman meme pointing fingers...

 

[LogicalApex]

It must be exhausting for Apple to fight on every front for our privacy. It would be so easy to just fold up their tents and make a ton more money.

Apple is not perfect. Far from it. But thank heavens it is run by principled leaders who fight for us. They don’t need to—yet they do anyway. And I, for one, am thankful.

I am happy that my interests and Apple's profit interest align in this case to give me a product I'm interested in. Apple doesn't pursue privacy instead of profit... They pursue it in favor of profit. It is the strongest area Google can't compete with them on since a core portion of their business model (including for Android) is profiting from personalized ads which require user data collection...

Don't prescribe morals and principals to corporations. They lack capacity for anything more than profit seeking.

 

[kingtj1971]

Latest T-Mobile knowledge base article says: Aliens!

 

[0924487]

Apple does say that there are network setups that could cause iCloud Private Relay not to work. Networks that audit traffic or perform network-based filtering will block access to Private Relay. This includes enterprise and school networks, which often have traffic monitoring policies, as well as cellular providers that are offering network-based services like Parental Controls, as is the case in T-Mobile's situation.

I thought the point of having a VPN or equivalent is so that you can circumvent network-level traffic sniffing and access restrictions. If you design your VPN or equivalent system so that they are easy to detect and block even without the use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), then it would be significantly less useful for a lot of people.

N.B., DPI is a very effective but computationally expensive technique for the network operators and national ISPs to implement. It can sort traffic based on protocol type, e.g., sniffing out VPN traffic and handle it accordingly. Let it be throttling, blocking, or intentionally dropping a percentage of the packets randomly, or send fake ARK and RESET packets to interrupt VPN connections.

 

[frenchcamp49er]

T-Mobile got caught. ?