Apple has reversed a planned change to its Hide My Email privacy feature after concerns it would have undermined the very anonymity the service is designed to provide. The iCloud+ feature works by generating random email addresses that websites cannot distinguish from a user's real one, but a proposed shift to a new domain would have let companies identify masked addresses instantly, allowing them to potentially block or discriminate against users signing up with them.

In June, Apple had said new Hide My Email addresses would move from the standard @icloud.com domain to @private.icloud.com, a change that would have made masked addresses easily identifiable and thus far less useful. Apple announced the U-turn in a developer note on Monday without explaining its reasoning, though commentator John Gruber reported that staff on the Hide My Email team had raised "strong objections", alongside criticism from users online. The @private.icloud.com domain will still be used, but only for new Sign in with Apple addresses later this year, which poses no privacy risk since websites already know that method is being used. The episode follows an earlier bug, patched this year, that had exposed real email addresses hidden behind the feature, which Apple reportedly knew about for over a year before fixing it once press coverage grew.