Today I upgraded my iCloud storage. It told me it was turning on a new feature called “private relay”. Prolific regards private relay as a form of VPN, thus risking closure of your account. I had to turn it off. Go into your icloud settings and double check that private relay is definitely off.
I feel like I have to regularly check to ensure a VPN isn’t being forced onto my device with new updates/upgrades. I understand that the average person might want that feature but it should be optional/require user consent before it turns on. Smh!
Anonymize local IPs exposed by WebRTC. Which it’s default setting is:
Conceal local IP addresses with mDNS hostnames. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Lacros
enable-webrtc-hide-local-ips-with-mdn
However, websites like https://whatismyipaddress.com/ were showing my correct IP address, so I looked into this more, and this is what I found:
WebRTC IP protection only hides local IP addresses: The chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-hide-local-ips-with-mdns flag only hides local IP addresses (e.g., 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x) from being exposed to websites via WebRTC. It does not hide your public IP address.
It would be nice if u/prolific-support can confirm that using the default flag in Chrome, # enable-webrtc-hide-local-ips-with-mdns is ok, and doesn’t compromise our accounts.
Private relay isn’t new, it came out in 2021. And yes, it’s very much viewed as a VPN from the server side because it decrypts DNS traffic, even though technically speaking it’s not a true VPN.
It’s always a good rule of thumb to not enable anything that will mimic a VPN when doing survey work because it makes you look suspicious. This is something that’s explained when you sign up.
Edge, which is based on Chrome, has the same setting - enabled by default. I’ve turned it off - perhaps it will eventually clear my nearly 3 month long IP ban.
This is honestly a huge problem with prolific themselves. They need to get with the times on this issue. There’s a lot of valid reasons to use a VPN. One in particular is getting around isp throttling.
Sure, but there are just too many bad actors that would use a VPN to circumvent location/language requirements. Studies would be inundated with trash data by users who clearly have English as a 2nd or even 3rd language. Or maybe they just use ChatGPT to get through the written portions of a study and you now have awkward sounding blocks of text that all use the same writing style. Amazon Mturk has shown what happens when bad actors can easily circumvent location/language requirements.