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Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly are likely being used for Apple's new Private Relay feature

By Kenny Yeo - on 21 Jun 2021, 10:31am

Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly are likely being used for Apple's new Private Relay feature

One of the most interesting new features of macOS Monterey is something called Private Relay.

Private Relay will be part of the new features coming to macOS Monterey via iCloud+, which is a suite of privacy features that will be available to any paying member of iCloud. So yes, even the lowest 50GB plan will qualify.

Briefly, Private Relay was designed to prevent ISPs and websites from tracking your online activities. To do this, Apple will relay your data through two servers: an Ingress Proxy and an Egress Proxy. The first is managed by Apple and the second by a "trusted partner".

The basic idea behind this that there's a separation of identity and online activity. The Ingress Proxy knows a bit of you who are, but it can't see what you are doing online. The Egress Proxy knows your online activity but doesn't know who you are.

However, Apple has yet to reveal who its trusted partners are, which is curious and also a little unnerving for some people.

Fortunately, after playing around with the developer betas for a couple of days, users have determined that Akamai, Cloudflare, and Fastly are some of the partners being used for this feature.

(Image source: Streaming Media Blog)

Furthermore, the report states that during Fastly's Q1 earnings call, the company expects revenue growth to accelerate in the second half of the year. 

Additionally, during the call, Joshua Bixy, Fastly's CEO said:

You're right, it's us looking at what's coming down the pipe. It's the growth in our existing customers. And it's a lot of really important opportunities that are coming our way that our foundation of us being a unique extremely large network that really values security, privacy, and other things that are really top of mind.

For many users, Private Relay would be a nice feature to have especially when it's available to all paying members of iCloud.

Savvier users will no doubt want to evaluate their options knowing now that Akamai, Cloudflare and Fastly are being used. Do they trust these companies enough or is it better off sticking to their VPNs.

Source: Streaming Media Blog

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