T-Mobile Says iOS 15.2 Bug Turning Off iCloud Private Relay for Some Users

[DrV]

Exactly. Europe claims to protect privacy but in reality they want access to all the sites you visit and what you do. It isn’t just the carriers either, it is the governments also who want access.

An interesting interpretation, indeed.

First, "Europe" (the EU, European Commission) has not banned or threatened to ban Apple Private Relay. Four carriers operating in Europe (T-Mobile included) have sent the European Commission a letter essentially stating they do not like Apple making it more difficult to spy their customers. The European Commission has neither replied nor taken any action.

Second, the background of digital sovereignty in Europe is worth understanding. The situation in the US has been called "surveillance capitalism", as companies are quite free to monetize customer (or even customer's) data. China has its own state-controlled model. The EU does not want either, and the underlying idea is to give individual citizens as much control over their own data as possible.

Of course, different companies and governments want to have access to our data, and not everyone is happy with the existing and emerging EU regulation. Quite obviously, those four telcos are not too happy.

 

[CarlJ]

To make this a metaphor: A traffic cop cannot direct traffic with a blindfold on.

Well, technically, they can, but there’s likely to be a whole bunch of accidents.

 

[MauiPa]

TMobile. Renowned for their quality! LOL

 

[acadiel]

Guy who originally tweeted that it was being blocked here.

No content filtering. On a Sprint sim on the Kickstart V1 plan. No filtering, restrictions or anything on my account to block, nada. Two toggled are turned on.

Have had two in depth conversations with Sprint T-Force and their tech support. The only thing they can guess is that the Sprint SIM might be causing issues and they want me to migrate to a T-Mobile SIM and see if it fixes it. They couldn’t find anything in the back end systems causing it.

Put a Ting VZW sim in my phone and Private Relay works like it should. So, it’s carrier related.

On my tweet, there were a handful of others having the same issue. So either it’s an Apple backend issue, or a carrier back end issue.

 

[sdf]

“Bug”

I believe it. You think Apple would give them the capability to turn it off?

 

[Kikjou Delatour]

Content filtering was turned on on my prepaid plan by default. To turn it off, T-Mobile require proof of my identity. The thing is, I am anonymous because I never gave them my personal details when I signed up years ago. And I want to keep it this way. I did not know I signed up with a nanny service.

 

[killhippie]

EE in the UK have a block adult contact filter you can turn on, without knowing what site you go to they cant block that action. Ironically even though hiding DNS lookups seems great there is a lot of angst for DoH which this really is as it can mess up security, like if you have a Asus router with AI protection on, that will block Relay as it needs to see where you are trying to browse to to protect you.

I'm with EE in the UK yet mines turned on and I don't even use iCloud! Also even with DNS lookups hidden they do see the site you connect to so it kind of defeats the point. Its about what you want, keep yourself safe online by having safe browsing working then you cant really have relay, also your router needs to support DoH as well. Just adding Cloudflare servers wont work.

Your hardware has to actively support DoH and not many home ISP routers do, mine is getting an update next month which will bring DoH but the balance of security and privacy seem lost on some people here. If you want security they know where you browse to, but seriously which do you want security or the potential of going to a phishing site unless your ISP supports DNSSEC? Also in corporate environment's they wont allow DoH any way as they need to monitor traffic so this whole new Apple magic is a two sided sword that can actually make your security worse, all so they dont see you browsing to Amazon or Apple etc, but do see the moment you connect to the site which deafets the point although after that handshake your traffic is hidden again as its hopefully a HTTPS site. The article below from 2019 explains all this quite well.

DNS-over-HTTPS causes more problems than it solves, experts say

Several experts, companies, and national entities have voiced very convincing concerns about DoH and its features.

www.zdnet.com

 

[Xtir]

Exactly. Europe claims to protect privacy but in reality they want access to all the sites you visit and what you do. It isn’t just the carriers either, it is the governments also who want access.

Yeah.. conspiracy! If it's in the business model of apple it's ok, remember csam? If it's in the business model of a carrier it's privacy-invading.. europe taking a stand for it's citizens is probably 'dictatorial' or 'socialist', although it's probably a 'bug'. Calm down..

 

[sudo-sandwich]

I was going to try and figure out what's going on here, but this thread is too toxic.

 

[wanha]

You clearly didn't bother to read the article.



So T-Mobile is blocking the use of iCloud Private Relay if people have content filtering turned on. That's on T-Mobile. They're the ones blocking such.

"T-Mobile is blocking the use of iCloud private relay..."

You are clearly insinuating that T-Mobile is doing this on purpose (e.g. your "scammy" comment).

But what proof of this do you have?

How do you know it is not a bug?

 

[wanha]

I was going to try and figure out what's going on here, but this thread is too toxic.

Thanks for adding your judgement to what was already a rather ugly mess

 

[laptech]

We know how it work's T-Mobile, block the feature and then claim it is a 'bug' thus being able to keep the feature blocked until Apple supposedly roles out a fix which then T-Mobile unblocks the feature.

 

[jamcgahey]

So this happened to me. I simply turned private relay back on and it seems to have done the trick.

 

[coffeeboat]

I had this problem back in November on Three in the UK, and continue to have the problem, despite Three claiming they don't block Private Relay at all. I wouldn't be surprised if this was an iOS bug.

Can your ISP disable iCloud Private Relay?

Recently, a message has started appearing in the Private Relay section of my iPhone's settings. It says: I checked my IP on both wifi and cellular using one of those "what's my IP" websites. Wifi shows a Cloudflare IP address (so Private Relay is working). Using only mobile data, I see my IP...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[4nNtt]

Do video and music services bypass iCloud Private Relay? T-Mobile normally doesn't count these services toward your data plan, but if they don't bypass you might have higher data usage then expected.

 

[0924487]

And for all of you outraged about this being tracked... you all WERE using a VPN, right? RIGHT??

Yes, OpenVPN with obfuscation too. So, to ISPs, school and corporate firewalls, GFW, etc., my VPN traffic would look like normal TCP traffic. (Would not be throttled or blocked even for P2P traffic.)

 

[Bandaman]

Yes, OpenVPN with obfuscation too. So, to ISPs, school and corporate firewalls, GFW, etc., my VPN traffic would look like normal TCP traffic. (Would not be throttled or blocked even for P2P traffic.)

The point of a VPN is that it keeps you from being bottlenecked because they have no idea what the data is to be throttled in the first place due it being passed through an encrypted tunnel. If your ISP blocks or throttles P2P traffic it means your VPN is either not working or you forgot to turn it on because that’s a very basic function of a VPN. The other factor is whether or not that VPN honors not giving up data. And so far one of the very few that honor no knowledge logs are NordVPN (who have been audited several years in a row checking for this) and ExpressVPN who were literally raided and had nobody’s data.

 

[clevins]

Hahahaha. Okay. So T-Mobile blocks things when they can't understand them. That's a poor policy and not what's stated in their policy for the function. It would also indicate that they need to read far more into what's being sent than they let on.

Pretty pretentious with your comments through this thread. Do you work for T-Mobile and feel the need to justify their mistakes?

No, I just have this thing called a brain. I use it to apply the advanced concept of 'logic'. You might try that since you clearly don't understand this.

And the word you're looking for isn't 'pretentious' it's 'condescending' - used here because you don't understand the simple concept that to filter content, an ISP has to be able to see what the content is and I have neither the time nor the patience for people like you who spout off and, when confronted with the illogic of their statement, double down. Luckily, I have this button on your profile called Ignore.

 

[clevins]

Yes, OpenVPN with obfuscation too. So, to ISPs, school and corporate firewalls, GFW, etc., my VPN traffic would look like normal TCP traffic. (Would not be throttled or blocked even for P2P traffic.)

Good. I made that comment because I'd bet that many, perhaps the vast majority of people complaining that ISPs can see their traffic don't do this... and if they've not cared enough to use a VPN until now, how much do they really care about their data being viewed vs just wanting to bitch and whine?

 

[clevins]

I had this problem back in November on Three in the UK, and continue to have the problem, despite Three claiming they don't block Private Relay at all. I wouldn't be surprised if this was an iOS bug.

Can your ISP disable iCloud Private Relay?

Recently, a message has started appearing in the Private Relay section of my iPhone's settings. It says: I checked my IP on both wifi and cellular using one of those "what's my IP" websites. Wifi shows a Cloudflare IP address (so Private Relay is working). Using only mobile data, I see my IP...

forums.macrumors.com

Do you have Limit IP Tracking on or off? If it's off, try turning it on.