Apple’s plan to change a privacy feature that allows paying customers to hide their real email addresses when creating online accounts could make it easier for apps and websites to block anonymous signups.
Apple’s Hide My Email is an iCloud+ feature that creates anonymous email addresses under the @icloud.com domain, which then forwards messages to a person’s actual email address. The reason these privately created email addresses work is because they are indistinguishable from regular Apple users, whose email addresses also use the @icloud.com domain.
Apple said a note to developers on Monday that in the coming weeks the company will migrate its anonymously generated email addresses @private.icloud.comeffectively making it easier for apps and websites to know that an email address is private and prevent users from signing up.
Existing addresses will continue to work and forward mail without interruption, Apple said in the note to developers. The company added that app and email providers should update their filtering to ensure that emails to customers that rely on the feature continue to get through.
Several Apple users on Reddit criticized the change in the email domainsaying it would be more difficult to use the service.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment from TechCrunch about the change, nor did it explain why it made the change.
Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Apple handed over the actual account information of a user who created an anonymous email address using Hide My Email to send an allegedly threatening email to the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel.
The Trump administration has made efforts over the past year to expose anonymous accounts, including those of Trump critics, by using subpoenas to demand that tech companies hand over information about their users.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
