Mullvad DoH or iCloud Private Relay?

Privacy Questions
1

Hi everyone,
What do you think about iCloud private relay ?
What is the benefit of using Mullvad DoH if you enable iCloud private relay?
Thanks

2

You get the DNS-level adblocking of the Mullvad resolver.

1 Like
3

As a point of clarification because your reply could be misinterpreted, OP’s full question was:

What is the benefit of using Mullvad DoH if you enable iCloud private relay?

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that if you use iCloud Private Relay, it will override whatever DNS settings you’ve set manually. At least in teh browser and mail apps where Private Relay applies. So in the context of OP’s question of using both things together, I don’t know if they would benefit from DNS-level adblocking in the browser or mail app. But of course, a browser adblocker could be used in combination with DNS level blocking and is more effective regardless.

4

No, it will honour your DNS setting and apply the filtering to your Safari browsing - it works with NextDNS. AFAIK it will still use its own DNS resolver, too.

5

I’m a bit unclear about what you mean by:

In this scenario which DNS resolver would take precedence? Or are you saying that it will honor the custom set DNS outside of the private relay tunnel and use its own DNS for tunneled traffic?

6

I’m not sure about the details but this was brought up in the NextDNS forums a few years ago and the devs were unhappy with how NextDNS works with iCloud Private Relay and they were in contact with Apple to change it.

I distinctly remember that they mentioned that it does work (I can confirm that) but that PR still does an additional DNS lookup for macOS-internal stuff. That was 1-2 macOS major versions ago so things might have changed by now.