What is Apple’s New "Hide My Email" Feature?
September 27, 2021, Carly French & Phil Marsalona
As part of Apple's continued push into driving consumer privacy through their devices and services, the Cupertino company has announced an upcoming feature called "Hide My Email". This is part of a trio of new privacy-focused services for iCloud users under iCloud Plus.
Hide My Email enables users to sign up for digital services or accounts that require an email address without disclosing their actual email address. Instead, you create a fake email address linked to your real one – but only you and Apple know the linkage. This allows you to use your fake email addresses to create digital accounts without ever having to provide your real email.
This sounds confusing, right?
I have an idea - let’s look at an animated gif to see a visual of the process!
That was fun (and hopefully helpful)!
So, How Does It Work?
Under the new iOS 15 release, Apple users will have the option to enable the Hide My Email setting. Enabling this setting allows users to create new private email addresses or what marketers refer to as “burner” emails. Apple lets users do this in three steps:
- Create a random email address @icloud.com
- Add a label/note for detailing where this might be used
- Connect it to a real forwarding email address
Once this feature is enabled, the user will be able to insert the “burner” email address into online forms or into the “from” field when sending an email from the Apple Mail app. Users will be prompted when an email address field is detected to drop in a “Hide My Email” address or create a new one. For example, let’s say a user is signing up for a company’s newsletter. They can use the “Hide My Email” option and submit it. Apple then forwards any messages to their real inbox.
But What Does This Mean for Marketers?
As the digital privacy landscape has been rapidly evolving with ITP3, Google’s announcement of the third-party cookie’s deprecation, and now Apple’s forthcoming slew of additional privacy services including Hide My Email, the marketer’s job will only continue to become more difficult.
As the third-party cookie fades into history, the adtech industry has started working toward leveraging alternative individual-level identifiers at scale such as the universal unique identifier (UUID). However, this solution and others like it are often dependent on hashing processes centered around the user’s email address. If brands aren’t receiving a user’s actual email address (phil@icloud.com in the GIF above) then they can’t use those actual emails to onboard email-driven hashed IDs into the adtech ecosystem. This will result in a proliferation of different IDs for users in the ecosystem and will decrease match rates across publisher networks and adtech solutions.
Confusing again? I know. But let’s look at another GIF to walk through the steps.
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