How do I enable the firewall on iPhone 12?

No, you don't.

On other platforms, firewall software is needed to protect open communication ports against intrusion. Because iOS achieves a reduced attack surface by limiting listening ports and removing unnecessary network utilities such as telnet, shells, or a web server, no additional firewall software is needed on iOS devices.

There is not one to enable. You don't need one, the iPhone has all the protection you need if you use normal security precautions.

Please do not consider buying a useless app that claims to "protect", "optimize", "speed up", etc.

Verifyfffff wrote:

Get vpn

Firewalls and commercial first-few-hops VPNs are unrelated.

As for first-few-hops VPNs, by all means do spend actual money to have your network traffic centralized, scanned, processing, packaged, resold, logged, and tracked by little-known and too often sketchy firms.

Too many of the VPN entities have reportedly been previously connected with malware before the VPN business seemingly got profitable.

The other difficulty with too many of the first-few-hops providers is that the credentials are known, so decrypting the VPN is feasible.

If you do need something akin to a first-few-hops VPN for testing web services and testing web caching using geo-shifting, or for privacy, existing VPN servers including Algo and Streisand are potential options.

If you want privacy as differentiated from connection security and as differentiated from a firewall, enable the Private Relay feature available with iCloud+ subscriptions, and which is closer to Tor than are any of the common commercial VPNs. Private Relay—like Tor—is intended to mask the originating IP address from the destination web server. Your existing HTTPS connections and remote image loads then arise from elsewhere on the network, with Apple providing one of the two parts of the network link relay and another firm providing the other half of the relay.

But again, traditional VPNs (intended for connecting into the private network of an affiliated organization, and still quite useful), the privacy-hazardous first-few-hops commercial VPNs (mentioned in my text above), and private relay are all intended for other purposes entirely, and are not akin to a firewall.

Why does my iPhone have “enable firewall” if I don’t need it?

You likely installed a 3rd party garbage app.....which you don't need......on your iPhone. Delete it.

About a VPN? If so, here's more info on them:

https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

A VPN can do absolutely nothing to hide any data going between you and the site you're viewing since only half of the communication is encrypted. Anything going to the site from the VPN and back to it is in the clear, or the site you're accessing would have no idea what to do with the encrypted data.

A VPN has only two uses:

1. You're using it to send and receive content from a truly tunneled VPN at your place of employment. Only the servers at the office get the unencrypted data from you as output from the VPN. Anything coming back to you is encrypted. Meaning, anyone trying to capture data between you and the office will only ever see encrypted data. A hacker would have to somehow breach the business' server on the clear input/output side, or your end to get anything.

2. You're trying to hide yourself. Since a VPN encrypts what's coming back to you, it does a good job at hiding what IP address the data is going back to (and as the link mentions, even this doesn't do a good job of hiding you anymore). However, any and all VPN's log this data. If you do anything illegal and law enforcement tracks the clear data back to the VPN (and they can), they'll demand log data to see what IP address the data was output to. The site running the VPN will give you up. They aren't going to go to jail for what you do.

Free VPNs sell your data.

This isn't exactly breaking news. It's been known for a very long time that free VPN's (in particular) log and sell your data. How else do you think they pay for their servers?

It's the same model as Google, and in particular, Chrome. You are the product. Chrome runs a background daemon from the moment you turn your computer on, whether Chrome itself is running or not. Its job is to constantly send anonymized data back to Google about your web and personal computer usage.

NordVPN is supposedly one of the better offerings. But it's still mostly useless. No matter what web site you're communicating with, only what you send to the VPN and it sends back to you is encrypted. Every bit of data out of the VPN to the site you're visiting, and from there back to the VPN is the same as using no VPN at all. It has to be, or the sites you're visiting would just get a load of encrypted data they can't do anything with.

VPN reviews you find online are also almost completely untrustworthy.

https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn-cyberghost-pia-zenmate-vpn-review-sites/

Orion1980 wrote:

Why does my iPhone have “enable firewall” if I don’t need it?

Because you decided to have a problem that third-party advertising conveniently claims to resolve.

Advertising works, and gets some folks to install unnecessary, or sketchy, or rubbish, or privacy-invasive apps.

There’s a reason whole classes of apps get advertised heavily, as they’re far too often collecting your data.

One of the better-known Mac anti-malware packages was caught a while back reselling complete and personally-identified browser activities and online purchasing. They claim to not be doing that any more, of course.

A firewall and a VPN are two entirely different things. And unless you're using a VPN as a truly tunneled connection between two points, they are useless.

Get vpn

Useless in almost all cases for iPhone users, but it will help to line the pockets of the company selling the app.

You're welcome. 🙂