Apple Hide my email feature It is a convenient privacy tool that uses disposable addresses to hide a user’s real email for online anonymity. Unfortunately, new research appears to show that a bug in this feature allows users’ real email addresses to be exposed.
It was wrong Quoted by 404 Mediawhich states that it has tested and verified the vulnerability. Tyler Murphy, the researcher who discovered the flaw, said that he warned Apple about the problem more than a year ago, and that it is unclear why the company has not addressed the problem yet. Murphy added that all attempts to exploit the vulnerability were successful.
“We don’t know the full scope of the problem, but in our limited testing with volunteers, 100% of Hide My Email addresses were exploitable,” Murphy said. Details of the vulnerability were not disclosed publicly, for fear of it being exploited.
Murphy is the co-founder of EasyOptOuts, which offers a paid data scraping service that removes your information from data broker sites. “Publicly accessible people search sites make it easy to link an email address to other personal details, so people who rely on Hide My Email for security may be at risk,” he told 404 Media.
TechCrunch has reached out to Apple for more information and will update this story if it responds.
When it comes to the world of technology, privacy tools are hard to come by, and unfortunately, even when they are, they don’t always work. Apple has been accused of this kind of thing before.
Case in point: The company was sued in 2022 afterward It has been reported That iPhone apps continued to send analytical data to Apple even when the iPhone Analytics privacy setting was turned on.
Likewise, in 2023, researchers found that another of Apple’s privacy features is Effectively “useless”. The research claimed that the tool that was supposed to anonymize mobile users’ Wi-Fi connections by providing random MAC addresses (an easily traceable identifier) was simply revealing the user’s real MAC address.
Apple has built much of its reputation and brand on user privacy, so hopefully it can address the obvious Hide My Email bug with some benefit. If it could learn how to better stand behind its privacy promises, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, either.
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