Apple’s iCloud Private Relay isn’t as private as you think
Security researchers have found that Apple’s iCloud Private Relay does not fully conceal a user’s IP address when passkey verification occurs. The credential service fetches the validation file directly, bypassing Safari and revealing the real IP to the requesting website. Apple has not provided a workaround for this issue, adding to recent privacy concerns with its iCloud+ features.
- ▪Private Relay routes Safari traffic through a two-hop relay, but passkey verification requests bypass this mechanism and expose the device’s actual IP address.
- ▪The researchers state that any website supporting or mimicking passkeys can obtain the real IP even when Private Relay is enabled.
- ▪There is currently no method to prevent this IP leak while using Safari with Private Relay turned on.
- ▪The issue follows earlier reports of Apple’s Hide My Email tool unintentionally revealing users’ real email addresses.
Digital Trends files mainly under tech. We currently carry 686 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Digital Trends |
| Canonical URL | https://www.digitaltrends.com/phones/apples-icloud-private-relay-isnt-as-private-as-you-think/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 06 Aug 2026 05:31:45 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-06T05:35:47.544Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-06T05:35:47.544Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | fuYHYv2KPyVI · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
If you pay for iCloud+ and rely on Private Relay to hide your IP address while browsing, you might want to pay attention to this one. New research by security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry, first reported by 404 Media, reveals that Private Relay doesn’t hide your IP address as well as Apple claims. How does the leak actually happen? Private Relay is supposed to route your Safari traffic through a two-hop relay so nobody, not even Apple, can connect your identity to the sites you visit. The problem lies in how passkeys work. When a website asks your device to verify a passkey, your iPhone’s credential service fetches the validation file directly, bypassing Safari and Private Relay.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Digital Trends.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Digital Trends
