Apple’s Hide My Email feature is pretty straightforward. When enabled, it generates an email address that users can use to sign up for online services, thus protecting their privacy and their actual email. Unfortunately, it looks like Apple is facing a lawsuit over the Hide My Email feature over alleged claims that it actually exposes a user’s real email address.
Apple facing Hide My Email lawsuit
According to the proposed class action lawsuit, it alleges that Apple violated California’s false advertising law. It claims that Apple knowingly offered users a feature that did not work as advertised. This is quite an egg on Apple’s face, especially since the company has made protecting user privacy their whole brand.
Just in case you’re hearing about this for the first time, security researcher Tyler Murphy who the co-founder of EasyOptOuts discovered the flaw back in 2025. Murphy claimed to have reported the issue to Apple. But for some reason, an entire year later and Apple has yet to fix it. This means that there are a lot of users out there using the feature that don’t know their real emails might have been exposed.
That being said, so far there haven’t been reports of the flaw being exploited. This is because the researchers did not share the steps involved as a security measure. But the fact that they found it means there’s a chance malicious actors could find it as well. Apple has yet to respond to the Hide My Email lawsuit, so it is unclear how this will proceed.
Why is this dangerous?
Now, there are a lot of websites out there that we use our real email addresses with. So some of you might think that this isn’t really that big of a deal, but it is. This is because if you’re someone trying to protect your online privacy, a malicious actor using your real email address could use it to uncover more details about you.
They could potentially gain access to your actual name, home address, or phone number. Or in some cases, they could check databases of leaked passwords to see which online accounts are associated with this email and log into them. Hopefully this lawsuit will light a fire under Apple and force them to fix it.
That being said, maybe there’s a reason Apple has delayed it. The company is said to be planning changes to the feature. It will switch addresses from “iCloud.com” to “private.iCloud.com” which some privacy advocates claim makes it less private.
The post Apple Faces Lawsuit Over Hide My Email After Ignoring Flaw for a Year appeared first on Android Headlines.
