iCloud Amazon requiring authentication for orders placed through iCloud Private Relay

[FloatingBones]

A friend was attempting to place an Amazon order on an iPad. She got a message that Amazon required authentication of the order -- by sending a text message to her cell phone. Amazon was reporting on the text message that the order was coming in from another state. That was alarming until I remembered I had turned on iCloud Private Relay for my friend and the requests were getting re-routed through the Apple service.

Is Amazon really flagging orders solely because an Apple user is going through the relay service? It seems that Amazon (and Apple) would be getting a bunch of help desk calls about this -- and even some cancelled orders -- because many would have no idea why the extra validation step was happening.

Friction was a bit higher for my friend than an iPhone user because she was using an iPad and has an Android smartphone.

 

[Sheepish-Lord]

Private Relay is disabled by default and it specifically says it’s in beta when you enable it. Amazon did exactly what they should have done and so did the private relay.

 

[FloatingBones]

Private Relay is disabled by default and it specifically says it’s in beta when you enable it. Amazon did exactly what they should have done and so did the private relay.

What exactly do you think the "exactly they should have done" behavior of Amazon have to do with the fact that iCloud Private Relay is in beta? AFAICT, the service works perfectly -- except for Amazon's alarm.

iCloud Private Relay has been available for over a year. iOS 15 was released in September 2021. The service may continue to be "disabled by default" when it comes out of this very long beta. Amazon must have had tens if not hundreds of thousands of orders come through this service -- and hundreds of thousands more orders coming through a VPN. Betas have nothing to do with it -- Amazon should be able to figure out that requests are being proxied.

The purpose of putting the discussion on MR was to make the topic findable by others. For me, a search on
amazon icloud private relay
is the #3 hit on google. That ranking may vary a bit for different users. Users that don't have access to their Amazon validation device can temporarily disable iCloud Private Relay to [hopefully] order without alarming Amazon. Here are the iOS/iPadOS instructions. Here are the Mac instructions.