Crowd Relay only uses far-away regions, never your nearby area.
The future Regional Relay feature is designed as an explicit opt-in network where participating customers can contribute relay capacity for privacy locality — but a node is never eligible for requests too close to that node's real region.
Relay eligibility rules
Opt-in only
A customer device/network/VPN path is not considered unless the customer explicitly joins the relay beta.
Never too close
The policy blocks requests from the same region and blocks nearby requests under the configured minimum distance.
Different-region only
Relay matching is intended for requests in a different region so customers do not proxy traffic that is local to them.
How matching works
- User selects a privacy region.
- System looks for opted-in relay nodes.
- Nodes in the same region are rejected.
- Nodes closer than the minimum distance are rejected.
- Eligible far-away nodes may be considered based on region, status, and customer settings.
Customer controls
Join / leave
Customers must be able to join, pause, or leave relay participation from the app.
Limits
Customers should see bandwidth, region, active status, and relay-health settings before opting in.
Separate from protection
Customers can use VPN Watchdog, Chrome extension, and Android location features without joining Crowd Relay.