Apple’s ‘Trusted Partners’ for iCloud Private Relay Include Akamai, Fastly, and Cloudflare

Dan Rayburn, writing for Streaming Media Blog:

On Monday, Apple announced some new privacy features in iCloud, one of which they are calling Private Relay. The way it works is that when you go to a website using Safari, iCloud Private Relay takes your IP address to connect you to the website and then encrypts the URL so that app developers, and even Apple, don’t know what website you are visiting. The IP and encrypted URL then travels to an intermediary relay station run by what Apple calls a “trusted partner”. In a media interview published yesterday, Apple would not say who the trusted partners are but I can confirm, based on public details (as shown below; Akamai on left, Fastly on the right), that Akamai, Fastly and Cloudflare are being used.

It’s a little weird that Apple doesn’t want to talk about who these “trusted partners” are, because if we don’t know who they are, how are we supposed to trust them? Putting your name on a product or service is a badge of trust.

★ Sunday, 20 June 2021