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. On social media and Reddit threads, users criticized the change as defeating the purpose of the service altogether.
The company confirmed an update on Monday that Hide My Email addresses “will remain” on @icloud.com, after previously saying it would move users to @private.icloud.com.
Apple did not give a reason for changing its decision, but Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, who first reported the about-face, said that Apple employees had objected to the change all along.
Earlier this year, 404 Media reported that a bug in Hide My Email revealed people’s real email addresses. Apple fixed the bug more than a year after it was first made aware that emails rejected as spam would leak the masked users’ real email addresses.