Apple is changing how its Hide My Email privacy feature works, and the update could make the service significantly less useful for people who rely on it to stay anonymous online. The company told developers this week that anonymous email addresses generated through the feature will soon move to a new domain, and that change makes them much easier to identify and block.
Hide My Email is part of Apple’s iCloud+ subscription. It creates random email addresses under the @icloud.com domain that forward messages to a user’s real inbox. The whole point is that these addresses look identical to regular iCloud email addresses, so websites and apps have no easy way to tell them apart. That’s been the feature’s core strength since Apple launched it.
That is about to change. According to TechCrunch, Apple notified developers Monday that it will migrate anonymously generated addresses from @icloud.com to @private.icloud.com in the coming weeks. The new domain is a clear signal to any app or website that the address is a privacy alias, not a standard user account.
Apple says existing addresses will keep working and will continue to forward mail without interruption. The company also told developers and email providers they will need to update their filtering rules to make sure messages still reach customers who use the feature. What Apple has not done is explain why it is making this change at all. The company did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
The practical consequences are real. Once websites can reliably identify @private.icloud.com addresses, they can simply refuse them during sign-up. That would force users to hand over their real email address or skip the service entirely. The whole appeal of Hide My Email is that it gives users a layer of separation between their identity and the companies they interact with online. A separate, identifiable domain strips much of that away.
Reaction among Apple users has been critical. Several people on Reddit pushed back against the change, pointing out that it defeats much of the purpose of paying for the feature in the first place.
The timing also raises questions. Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported that Apple handed over the real account information of a user who had used Hide My Email to send an allegedly threatening message to the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel. Apple was legally required to comply with that request, but the case put a spotlight on the limits of the feature’s anonymity protections. Separately, the Trump administration has spent the past year pushing tech companies to unmask anonymous accounts, often through subpoenas, particularly targeting critics.
Whether the domain change is connected to any of that pressure is unknown. Apple has not offered any explanation. But for users who chose Hide My Email specifically because it was hard to detect, the update is a meaningful step backward.