China exempted from Apple’s 'private relay' feature

The feature was one of a number of privacy protections that the tech giant announced at its annual software developer conference held on Monday.

The decision to withhold the feature in China is the latest in a string of compromises the company has made on privacy in a country.

Earlier in 2018, Apple Inc. moved the digital keys used to lock Chinese users' iCloud data, allowing authorities to work through domestic courts to gain access to the information.

As per the new feature, it first sends web traffic to a server maintained by Apple, where it is stripped of a piece of information called an IP address. After that, tech giant send the traffic to a second server maintained by a third-party operator who assigns the user a temporary IP address and sends the traffic onward to its destination website.

The use of an outside party in the second hop of the relay system is intentional and is aim to prevent even Apple from knowing both the user's identity and what website the user is visiting.

It will also prevent advertisers from using IP addresses to pinpoint a person's location, he said.

Including China, the new feature will also not be available in Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines.

Apple has not yet disclosed which outside partners it will use in the system but said it plans to name them in the future.

However, the feature will not be available to the public until later this year.