Apple’s Hide My Email feature has always been a pretty good quality of life privacy tool. iCloud+ subscribers can access randomly generated email addresses that forward messages to their real inbox. This helps users avoid apps or websites seeing their real address. Apple also states that it does not read the forwarded messages either.
All of this makes it quite a handy tool that really reduces spam and puts a distance between you and the shady service that wants to receive your emails.
But what it apparently doesn’t do is hide your identity from law enforcement.
What’s up?
According to court documents viewed by TechCrunch, Apple told federal officials the true identities of at least two customers who had used Hide My email addresses. In one case in particular, the FBI sought documents related to an investigation involving an email that allegedly threatened Alexis Wilkins, who was publicly reported to be the girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel.
The affidavit cited in the report states that Apple identified the anonymized address as being linked to the target Apple account. The company even provided the account holder’s full name and email address, as well as records from an additional 134 anonymized email accounts created through this privacy feature.
TechCrunch also said it reviewed a second search warrant related to a Department of Homeland Security investigation into which Apple again provided information linking Hide My Email accounts to a user.
Why is this bothering you?
Before anyone calls out Apple for violating privacy, they should know the difference between corporate and government approval. Hide My Email is intended to protect users from apps, websites and marketers, not from legal requests.
Apple continues to store customer data such as names, addresses, billing details and other unencrypted information that can be handed over if authorities come knocking with the right documentation. So an email is a weak point here. Most emails are still not end-to-end encrypted, making it fundamentally different from services like Signal, which have grown in popularity precisely because of their robust data protection model.
