I have been using Private Relay for a few months and am impressed with its performance for me in USA. Sometimes I hire a Sweden-based VPN for other purposes. On macOS I understand Private Relay only applies to Safari and Mail (and maybe anything Apple?) but will having a VPN that is routing all traffic through, say, Spain, confound it? Will it confound me?
I believe Private Relay still works on top of a VPN, your network traffic will first go through the VPN, and then if Private Relay is available in the country your VPN is, then it goes through Private Relay again.
To update my own question, in case others come across this issue.
MacOS — in this case 13.0 Ventura — seems to detect that a VPN is in use and totally disables iCloud Private Relay regardless of where the VPN is geographically routing (in a supported country like USA, or somewhere else). It complains via a system notification the top right, and it gives you grief when you visit the System Settings for it. So there’s that!
Have not tried it with iOS.
For sure … but now the Private Relay thinks i’m in Estonia? Is that gonna ruin my stream watching? It goes through so many intermediaries.