Apple’s Hide My Email feature is a handy privacy tool that hides your real email using a disposable address for online anonymity. Unfortunately, new research shows that a bug in this feature could result in users’ real email addresses being revealed.
The bug was reported by 404 Media, which says it has tested and confirmed that the vulnerability exists. Tyler Murphy, the researcher who discovered the bug, said he alerted Apple to the problem more than a year ago, and it’s unclear why the company hasn’t yet fixed it. Murphy added that all attempts to exploit the bug were successful.
“We don’t know the full extent of the problem, but in our limited testing with volunteers, the Hide My Email address was 100% exploitable,” Murphy said. Details about the vulnerability have not been made public due to concerns that it could be exploited.
Murphy is the co-founder of EasyOptOuts, which provides a paid data removal service that removes your information from data broker sites. “Publicly accessible people search sites make it easy to link email addresses to other personal information, putting people who rely on Hide My Email for their safety at risk,” he told 404 Media.
TechCrunch has reached out to Apple for more information and will update this story if we hear back.
In the world of technology, privacy tools are hard to find, and unfortunately, even when they exist, they don’t always work. Apple has faced this type of criticism before.
Case in point: the company was sued in 2022 after it was reported that iPhone apps continued to send analytics data to Apple even when iPhone analytics privacy settings were turned on.
Likewise, in 2023, researchers discovered that another privacy feature from Apple was effectively “useless.” The study claimed that tools meant to anonymize mobile users’ Wi-Fi connections by providing random MAC addresses (easily traceable identifiers) simply expose the users’ real MAC addresses.
Apple has built much of its reputation and branding on user privacy, so hopefully some convenience will address the obvious Hide My Email bug. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if we could learn how to better keep our privacy promises.
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