iCloud Can your ISP disable iCloud Private Relay?

[coffeeboat]

Recently, a message has started appearing in the Private Relay section of my iPhone's settings. It says:

Private Relay is turned off for your data plan.
Your data plan doesn't support iCloud Private Relay. With Private Relay turned off, this network can monitor your internet activity and your IP address is not hidden from known trackers and websites.

I checked my IP on both wifi and cellular using one of those "what's my IP" websites. Wifi shows a Cloudflare IP address (so Private Relay is working). Using only mobile data, I see my IP address from my mobile ISP exposed.

So the message is accurate. My data plan is with Three in the UK; when I asked them about it they told me they don't block this service and I should talk to Apple. Of course.

A restart of the phone hasn't fixed it either.

Does anyone else on Three have this problem?

 

[coffeeboat]

So, a few hours later this is now working as expected again. Just a temporary glitch, which I guess is expected during beta.

But I find it interesting that cell providers can apparently disable iCloud Private Relay if they choose to - to the point that the UI has a message which explains so.

Has Apple announced that this is possible? I think it's fairly significant that the capability exists for iPR to remain switched on, yet not function outside of WiFi. If Apple makes iPR available more widely (i.e. not just to subscribers), I bet a lot of cell providers will want to be able to disable it, as otherwise they lose the ability to see their customers' traffic (and as such will be unable to provide them with zero rating, parental controls, limits to tethering, etc). Could be a sign of things to come...

 

[Tokenfreak]

I’m having the same issue right now. I can’t get mine working again.

 

[kaardowiq]

Every ISP, WLAN Hotspot etc. may block these services by not resolving the following dns entries:

mask.icloud.com
mask-h2.icloud.com

You may solve this by defining/overwriting with custom DNS servers like Google. Keep in mind that it may still be blocked in some other ways