Fortunately for those of you who don’t follow the sturm and drang of the endless Internet melodrama, Irreal has your back and follows it so you don’t have to. The latest contretemps involves carriers blocking, or threatening to block, or trying to get regulators to block Apple’s Private Relay.
Private Relay, for those of you who don’t know, is a sort of VPN that hides a user’s actions on the Internet. The carriers hate it, of course, because they like to record their users’ click streams and sell them to advertisers. For the carriers, Private Relay is worse than a VPN because it’s automatic and even naive users will have their Internet activity protected.
So far, it appears to be European carriers who are doing the blocking. Their reasons for doing so are the stuff of high humor. Their most humorous reason is that “it undermines ‘European digital sovereignty.’” The real reason, of course, is that it interferes with their ability to capture and sell their users’ Internet usage.
In the United States, T-Mobile users are the only ones experiencing this problem and T-Mobile says that it affects only those who have signed up for Internet filtering. That makes sense: if you want to filter what your children see in their browsers, your carrier has to be able to see that content. Some T-Mobile users say they don’t have content filtering and are still getting Apple Relay blocked so the situation remains ambiguous.
Those with any options should vote with their wallets and abandon any carrier doing this. If you can’t switch carriers, then consider using a traditional VPN instead. As far as Europe and their regulators are concerned, John Gruber has this to say: “Let’s see if the EU’s vaunted regulators know which side of this dispute is actually working in favor of user privacy. There should be no debate which side is right here.”
