Private Relay has one job: stop the websites you open in Safari from learning your actual location. According to researchers, it doesn’t do that job dependably.
In a blog post published Tuesday, Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk detailed a group of flaws that allow a website to extract the true IP address of a Private Relay user regardless. The pair also stood up a page where anyone can test themselves. We ran that test Tuesday, and it came back with our real IP address.
404 Media was first to report on the issue.
The flaws sit in WebKit, not in Private Relay’s plumbing
According to Bakry and Mysk, the root of the problem lies in three features of WebKit, the browser engine Apple builds. That’s a bigger deal than it may first appear: on iOS, every browser is running WebKit underneath, no matter what logo sits on the icon.
What Private Relay was never going to do for you
Plenty of people sign up for iCloud+ under the impression that a VPN comes with it. It doesn’t. A VPN masks your IP address system-wide, across every app on the device. Private Relay has to be switched on, it’s reserved for iCloud+ subscribers, and it does nothing outside of Safari.
The coverage, in other words, was narrow from the start. What’s new here is that the protection can be sidestepped even within that narrow window.
They didn’t tell Apple, and they said why
The usual route is to report to the vendor and hold the details back. Mysk bypassed that step entirely and explained the thinking on X: “our past experience with Apple tells us that reporting this issue would involve months of delays, inconsistent communication, and in some cases, denying the issue’s impact entirely.”
Treat that as a disclosure call you’re free to argue with. It also leaves no patch timeline for anyone to cite.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Worth knowing who’s telling you this
Mysk and his colleagues are behind a privacy-focused browser named Psylo, and they say Psylo has already added mitigations that keep users’ IP addresses from leaking. In short, the team that surfaced the leak also sells the product that seals it. None of that makes the research wrong — our own test matched their findings — but it’s context worth holding onto as you read.
If keeping your IP address hidden is central to your threat model, run the researchers’ test on your own device and look at the result. Then ask yourself whether a Safari-only, iCloud+-only switch was ever the right tool for the job you were trusting it with.