Apple has reversed 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, while still routing emails to their regular inboxes. The benefit is that these generated addresses cannot be distinguished from regular Apple users with an @icloud.com 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 criticised the change as defeating the purpose of the service.
Apple confirmed on Monday that Hide My Email addresses “will remain” on @icloud.com. The company 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.