US carriers deny blocking Apple’s new Private Relay feature

Earlier this week, there were reports that carriers were blocking Apple’s new Private Relay feature. The report comes after European carriers reportedly blocked the feature already. Considering that T-Mobile’s European counterpart was among those who blocked the feature, many decided to check with the US carrier. 

Since Apple released the new feature as a beta, it means that you will manually have to enable it on your device. This is where T-Mobile US users discovered this error message:

“Your cellular 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 or websites.”

When the issue raised enough attention, however, the three major carriers in the country have denied blocking the feature. AT&T and Verizon outright said that they are not blocking it. For T-Mobile, however, the issue seems to be more complicated than a yes or no answer. 

According to T-Mobile, most customers shouldn’t have a problem enabling this feature. But for those who have activated content filtering services, this feature is not available. So if you are using T-Mobile’s Family Controls, you may “not have access to iCloud Private Relay to allow these services to work as designed.”

After investigating, T-Mo also found an issue with the latest iOS 15.2 update. They found that the update toggles off the feature as a default. T-Mo has shared this discovery with Apple.

Apple has also released its own statement:  

“No changes were made to iCloud Private Relay in iOS 15.2 that would have toggled the feature off. Users are encouraged to check their Settings to see if Private Relay is enabled on their device or for a specific network.”

This led T-Mo to update its earlier statement:

“We wanted to update what we shared earlier. Apple doesn’t change customers’ settings when they update to iOS 15.2. Customers may see an error message if they previously toggled iCloud Private Relay or Limit IP Address Tracking off in their Cellular Data Options Settings. Apple has more details on their support page for this feature here.”

Source: TmoNews