Apple provides a long list of privacy-focused features to help you maintain your modern-day sanity. It’s not too often that you get to taste the actual benefit of these features and how they give you control over the flow of information.
For instance — privacy features in Safari are cool, but they’re largely transparent and once you turn them on, it’s not really all that clear how the features are benefitting you. That’s by design. You should just experience peace of mind with those features.
But there’s one privacy feature that enables you to be a little more active and in control, and you should be using it.
iCloud Hide My Email
iCloud+ provides the ability to create a unique and semi-ephemeral email address that will forward traffic to your main iCloud email address. You can use this to sign up for newsletters, apps, or anything that requires that you provide an email address. It may not be readily apparent how this will benefit you — but once you meet a vendor who doesn’t give a flying fuck about complying with data privacy requirements and marketing, you get to leverage your control.
Case in point: I used Hide My Email to sign up to obtain an offer from an alarm company. I’m constantly in search of a decent HomeKit-based alarm system (I’ve yet to find one that I’m happy with, HMU if you know of one). I saw one of these companies was having a sale — which they’re happy to give you a significant discount as long as you’re willing to cough up your email address.
Enter Hide My Email. I used it to generate an email address to mask my real one. It was set to forward the emails to my main address. Cool, I feel better about providing information to that company now. But the company started sending marketing emails once per day. I knew who it was, because they used the email address I had provided. Better yet, I knew who they sold my email address to.
I tried time and time again to click the unsubscribe links, but the company refused to obey. They kept sending emails. OK, no problem. Thanks to Hide My Email, all I have to do is go in to the settings on my phone and deactivate the forwarding of the email to my main iCloud.
Hear that? It’s the sound of modern-day peace and silence.
Thank you, Apple, for once again providing something useful to my modern-day life.