Apple’s Hide My Email tweak leaves privacy fans fuming

INDUSTRY NEWS 2 min read Apple's Hide My Email tweak leaves privacy fans fuming Graham CLULEY June 19, 2026 Promo Protect all your devices, without slowing them down. Free 30-day trial A few days ago, Apple quietly announced what might have seemed like a minor change to one of its most popular privacy features - and has left some users feeling that the company is pulling the rug from underneath them. Hide My Email is a privacy feature that lets users create unique, random email addresses that forward messages to your real inbox. That means you can sign-up for websites, newsletters, and apps without exposing your personal email address. The benefit? Well, you can simply delete the alias if a company starts sending you unwanted email - helping to reduce your exposure to spam, marketing lists, and data brokers as well as protecting your privacy. But now Apple has announced that it plans to move all newly-generated Hide My Email aliases from the familiar "@icloud.com" domain to "@private.icloud.com" instead. At first sight that may seem fine. The problem is, however, that one of the reasons that Hide My Email worked so well was because its aliases were indistinguishable from regular iCloud email addresses. When a website or app received a sign-up from an "icloud.com" address it had no way to tell if it was a genuine Apple user or someone using the privacy feature to protect themselves. However, when Apple makes you use a "@private.icloud.com" address, the ambiguity disappears. All any website or app that wants to block anonymous sign-ups now has to do is to reject any email address ending in "@private.icloud.com". Existing addresses on the old domains will continue to work and forward mail as before, according to Apple, but all newly-generated aliases will be issued on the new domain from later this summer. The reaction on Reddit was predictably swift, and unsurprisingly unimpressed. Many Apple users criticised the decision, saying it would make the Hide My Email feature significantly less useful for anyone trying to sign-up anonymously for services that don't want them to. In what was perhaps a reminder to users that Hide My Email does not guarantee anonymity, it was reported earlier this year that Apple had handed over to US law enforcement the real account details of a Hide My Email user after the account allegedly sent threatening messages to the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel. For now, if you already have existing Hide My Email addresses in use, they should continue to work without any changes on your part. But if you were planning to create new aliases in the future and use them as genuinely anonymous sign-up addresses, things may be about to get more complicated. TAGS industry news AUTHOR Graham CLULEY Graham Cluley is an award-winning security blogger, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s. View all posts RIGHT NOW TOP POSTS SCAM DIGITAL PRIVACY Instagram account recovery scams: how fake helpers steal your profile twice June 16, 2026 INDUSTRY NEWS How any Instagram account could be hacked in less than 10 minutes July 15, 2019 SCAM HOW TO Scammer phone number lookup. How to check if a phone number is a scam April 19, 2024 SCAM DIGITAL PRIVACY HOW TO How scammers gain access and hack your WhatsApp account and what you can do to protect yourself May 01, 2024 FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE INDUSTRY NEWS SCAM Cybercrime now rivals traditional crime across parts of Asia Filip TRUȚĂ June 19, 2026 4 min read INDUSTRY NEWS Apple's Hide My Email tweak leaves privacy fans fuming Graham CLULEY June 19, 2026 2 min read INDUSTRY NEWS SCAM Americans lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams last year — and the scams are getting harder to spot Filip TRUȚĂ June 17, 2026 5 min read BOOKMARKS You have no bookmarks yet. Tap to read it later.