The Private Relay problem between T-Mobile USA, Apple, and customers of both may not be as sinister as originally thought. Giving this the quickest of recaps, earlier this week, 9 to 5 Mac ran a piece that said T-Mobile/Sprint had shut down or was in the process of shutting down the Private Relay feature for its customers in the U.S. That day, T-Mobile said the only people unable to use Private Relay were people who’d set up some sort of filtering service through the carrier. Then the next day, T-Mobile said, “turns out there’s a bug in iOS 15.2 that’s turning Private Relay off.”
Guess who wasn’t happy about that. MacRumors ran a piece Wednesday that Apple saying there was no bug introduced in iOS 15.2. At the same time, Apple sort of came to T-Mobile’s defense. In a statement to MacRumors, the Cupertino-company said:
iCloud Private Relay is an innovative internet privacy service that allows users with an iCloud+ subscription to connect to the internet and browse with Safari in a more secure and private way. We have rolled Private Relay out in beta and it's available in most countries around the world. No carrier partners have blocked their users from taking advantage of Private Relay.
That would be the defending T-Mobile part. As for defending itself, Apple went on to say:
No changes were made to iCloud Private Relay in iOS 15.2 that would have toggled the feature off. Users are encouraged to check their Settings to see if Private Relay is enabled on their device or for a specific network.
T-Mobile, by the way, sort of backed off of its 15.2 bug talk. Apple Insider had the “uncarrier” issuing a statement on Wednesday, saying:
Apple doesn't change customers settings when they update to iOS 15.2… Customers may see an error message if they previously toggled iCloud Private Relay or Limit IP Address Tracking off in their cellular Data Options Settings.
Apple’s talk of a “specific network” and T-Mobile’s mention of “Limit IP Address Tracking” gets us closer to what’s actually been going on. It turns out users who want to enable Private Relay have to enable “Limit IP Address Tracking” as well. That one’s buried in Cellular Data Options, under Cellular in Settings on an iPhone or (I assume) a cellular enabled iPad.
If you would like to hear a bit more about this week’s back and forth and the (seemingly) temporary solution, that’s one of the topics on this week’s edition of “The Checklist by SecureMac.” You’re looking for Checklist No. 262 - General Mayhem and Private Relay. That’s Checklist No. 262, available where you get podcasts.