Apple rescues Hide My Email feature from the privacy scrap heap

In Brief Posted: 7:46 AM PDT · August 25, 2026 Image Credits:Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch Apple has reneged on a planned change to its Hide My Email feature that users said would have made the privacy tool less effective. Hide My Email is a privacy feature for paying iCloud+ users that generates a unique and disposable email address to give websites instead of a person’s real email address and still have emails route to their regular inboxes.

The benefit of the email-hiding feature is that privately generated email addresses cannot be distinguished from regular Apple users with an @icloud.com email address. However, the feature still allows Apple to tell law enforcement who is behind a masked email address. Earlier this year, the company said it would move users to @private.icloud.com, which users said would make it easier for websites to reject these email addresses during sign-ups.

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