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iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

developer.apple.com

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Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#51
post #43

it will still be on "private.icloud.com". Just as filterable...

private.icloud.com (née privaterelay.appleid.com) is the address for “Sign In With Apple”, which is an oauth-style service that sites opt into to let you use your Apple ID to sign in. Sites offering this as a signup option are already aware it gives users an option to use a private anonymized email address.

The toplevel “Hide My Email” iCloud feature is a different thing, can be done independently of a SIWA flow (you can just go into settings and make more addresses, all it needs is a name and a notes field) and uses @icloud.com in order to make your anonymized email address look indistinguishable from other iCloud users.

The former is “filterable”, yes, but it’s moot because you only get those if you offer Sign In With Apple in the first place, and if you want real emails, you would already know to just… not do that.

The latter is very much not filterable.

The confusing thing though, is that when a user uses Sign In With Apple, they are offered two options: “share my email” which gives the site your real address, and “hide my email” which gives an @private.appleid.com address. But this “hide my email” option is a totally different thing from the separate “hide my email” service, which lets you make arbitrarily many @icloud.com private aliases to forward to your real address. Critically, the latter toplevel Hide My Email feature works with sites that don’t use Sign In With Apple. It’s just stupidly unfortunate that Apple calls both of these features “hide my email.”

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, Apple is "big tech," but they are the only one that appears to give a crap about privacy at all. And really, they put a lot of money and effort into it. We need to give kudos when they are due. Apple's Private Cloud Compute should have won some kind of Nobel Privacy Prize, which for some reason does not yet exist.

The person you're replying to is saying "Sites I use block all VPNs besides Apple's subscription service VPN" - I'm not sure they're not blocking it just because they fervently believe in Apple's privacy commitments and engineering :) Only pointing this out because I love Apple's privacy story and don't want your reply to be misconstrued as sarcasm, and thus the reason why it enjoys a singular exemption is because it…

I’ve never been under the impression that privacy relay is anything like a true VPN. I mostly thought it stopped BS that happens on public WiFi and public sniffing. It’s meant to protect you only until you get to a major carriers infrastructure.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person you're replying to is saying "Sites I use block all VPNs besides Apple's subscription service VPN" - I'm not sure they're not blocking it just because they fervently believe in Apple's privacy commitments and engineering :) Only pointing this out because I love Apple's privacy story and don't want your reply to be misconstrued as sarcasm, and thus the reason why it enjoys a singular exemption is because it…

I’ve never been under the impression that privacy relay is anything like a true VPN. I mostly thought it stopped BS that happens on public WiFi and public sniffing. It’s meant to protect you only until you get to a major carriers infrastructure.

The design is supposed to be better than a true VPN, because neither Apple nor the exit node (Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly) are supposed to know both who you are and what you’re doing. Of course, Apple pays them for this service, so they could exchange info.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#55
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is the user being held hostage? you can redirect hide my email addresses to any domain

Marketing turds can't just block registrations from all of @icloud.com.

That doesn’t explain how the user is held “hostage” by Apple

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#56
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll try to add more later, but it is believed that multiple times, a bug in some random API has allowed for the “hidden” Apple account to be revealed because they resolve hide my emails to the original internally. Using a separate namespace would be the universal fix. A mitigation for the cause of https://www.404media.co/apple-hide-my-email-vulnerability-re...

This doesn't follow. The bounce message used to (effectively) say, > abc@icloud.com forwards to real@gmail.com If they switched the new domain and did nothing else, it would say: > abc@privaterelay.appleid.com forwards to real@gmail.com That's no better. Fixing that privacy leak is unrelated to whatever the destination domain is.

No, using a different domain makes it easy to across the board add a rule: don’t treat as Apple ID.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#58
This is a huge selling point. Private email relays often get blocked, the only lasting solution is to put them on the same domain as, and in the same format as, a significant number of non-private email addresses. As far as I’m aware the only other provider doing this is Fastmail.

Comments about lock-in aren’t wrong, but it has to be this way. You can make arbitrary email addresses at your own domain, but anybody who feels like it can trivially automatically detect that those are all you.

Personally I use unique at own domain only where I’m identifying myself anyway, like my bank, and Fastmail masked email where I’m not. For most things it’s not actually that terrible to accept a small risk that they’re offline for a day between your being booted without warning and you changing your email address with them.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#59

I'm a bit confused - when i see these signups, they look like this to me: rtwnj6tj7@privaterelay.appleid.com

I think the post is very explicit. First sentence: > Starting later this year, new Sign in with Apple addresses, previously issued on privaterelay.appleid.com, will be issued on private.icloud.com. Existing addresses on privaterelay.appleid.com will continue to work and forward mail to users without interruption.

That's the Sign in with Apple domain, not the Hide My Email domain. HME is remaining at icloud.com instead of moving to private.icloud.com as well. From the linked article:

> After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.

Re: iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com

#60
post #43

it will still be on "private.icloud.com". Just as filterable...

private.icloud.com (née privaterelay.appleid.com) is the address for “Sign In With Apple”, which is an oauth-style service that sites opt into to let you use your Apple ID to sign in. Sites offering this as a signup option are already aware it gives users an option to use a private anonymized email address. The toplevel “Hide My Email” iCloud feature is a different thing, can be done independently of a SIWA flow (you…

Not arbitrarily many aliases - there's a limit of (as of two or three weeks ago) 768.
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