If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Apple is about to label every anonymous email address its paying customers generate, creating a new obstacle for privacy-conscious users. Hide My Email, the iCloud+ feature that creates an alias “@icloud.com” address to shield your real inbox from apps and websites, has always worked because of one specific design choice. The generated addresses were indistinguishable from any other iCloud account. An app receiving “randomword_terms_42@icloud.com” had no way to tell whether it belonged to someone generating anonymous aliases or to someone’s grandmother. That forced services to treat all iCloud addresses equally because filtering out the anonymous ones meant filtering out millions of regular Apple customers too. Starting later this summer, new Hide My Email addresses will use “@private.icloud.com” instead of plain “@icloud.com,” according to a developer notice the company posted Monday. The “private” subdomain announces to any app or email provider on the receiving end that the person signing up doesn’t want to be identified and hands them a one-line domain filter to block those sign-ups entirely. Apple presented the move as a domain unification, consolidating Sign in with Apple addresses (previously on “@privaterelay.appleid.com”) under the same new subdomain. The company told developers that existing addresses on legacy domains will keep forwarding mail and that app and email providers should update their filtering to accommodate the change. The gap between “@icloud.com” and “@private.icloud.com” looks cosmetic but functions as a kill switch. Services can now ban all anonymous aliases without touching regular iCloud mailboxes, the same way they already block disposable email providers like Guerrilla Mail or Mailinator. The plausible deniability that made Hide My Email useful, the inability for a service to prove an address was anonymous, disappears the moment Apple stamps it with a subdomain that says so. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Apple’s New Subdomain Kills “Hide My Email” Cover appeared first on Reclaim The Net.