https://robfreeman.com/icloudprivate... If you’re concerned about cybersecurity, and you should be (I think you should develop a healthy level of paranoia about basically everything online today), you may have questions about iCloud Private Relay, Apple's answer to a VPN... And whether iCloud Private Relay is better, or worse or comparable to a VPN?

Approximately 850 million people use iCloud today and anyone who pays for an iCloud+ subscription has iCloud Private Relay included in their subscription… However, I would guess that most people have no idea what iCloud Private Relay is, or how it works, or what the benefits are, even if they’ve heard the term virtual private network, or VPN, before.

According to Apple: iCloud Private Relay keeps your internet activity private. It hides your IP address and browsing activity in Safari and protects your unencrypted internet traffic so that no one — including Apple — can see both who you are and what sites you’re visiting.

Apple Private Relay works with Apple's Safari browser and uses two proxy servers (the “ingress” and “egress” proxies, respectively) that provide you with a level of privacy to you when you browse the web. The first proxy server run by Apple encrypts the DNS content of you want to connect with and the second proxy server run by a 3rd party hides your IP address (i.e. who you are on the Internet)

So, the first proxy server encrypts the DNS information of the website you want to visit, then the second proxy server decrypts this information and assigns a new, random IP address to you that only approximates your location while connecting you to the content you want.

The limitations of Apple Private Relay are minimal, but it should be noted iCloud Private Relay only works with Safari and won’t mask the your IP address or DNS information when using Firefox, Chrome of Brave.

In contrast, a virtual private network (VPN) uses a single encrypted tunnel and masks your IP address across all your entire Internet connection, hiding your DNS information and IP address, no matter what app or browser you’re using.