PSA: Apple’s Private Relay can leak your real IP address
Apple's Private Relay feature, designed to hide a user's IP address, can be circumvented due to a series of flaws in the WebKit browser engine. The issue was discovered by researchers who found that three features in WebKit can reveal a user's real IP address, even when Private Relay is enabled. The researchers have set up a website where users can check if their real IP address is leaking, and they claim that Apple's history of handling bug reports led them to not disclose the issue directly to the company.
- ▪The Private Relay feature is only available to iCloud+ subscribers and only works while using the Safari browser.
- ▪The issue lies with three features in Apple's WebKit browser engine, which is used by all browsers in iOS.
- ▪The researchers who discovered the issue have developed a private browser called Psylo, which they claim has mitigations to prevent IP address leaks.
5 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 5 hours. Coverage spans 2 points on the political spectrum — 1 lean left, 3 centre.
- ▪ Apple's iCloud Private Relay is Leaking Users' Real IP Addresses — MacRumors
- ▪ Mysk: Apple's Private Relay tool can leak users' IP addresses due to issues in Apple's WebKit browser engine, also affecting OnionBrowser, a Tor browser for iOS (Joseph Cox/404 Media) — Techmeme
- ▪ Apple’s Private Relay isn’t always hiding your IP address, researchers say — Android Authority
- ▪ Apple's ‘Private Relay’ Is Exposing Users' Real IP Addresses — 404 Media
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Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/05/psa-apples-private-relay-can-leak-your-real-ip-address/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:52:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-05T16:55:41.770Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-05T16:55:41.770Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | vyF4wCtWdKdA · 5 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Apple’s Private Relay, an opt-in feature designed to hide a user’s IP address when they browse the internet with Safari, can be circumvented to reveal the supposedly hidden IP address due to a series of flaws. Researchers revealed the issues in a blog post on Tuesday. The researchers also set up a website where anyone can check if their real IP address leaks, even if they use Private Relay. In a test on Tuesday, TechCrunch verified that the site was able to reveal our real IP address. The issue was first reported by 404 Media. Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk, the researchers who found the issue, wrote in their blog post that the problem lies with three features in Apple’s web browser engine WebKit, which is used by all browsers in iOS.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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