APPLE TO SHIFT HIDE MY EMAIL ADDRESSES TO NEW DOMAIN

Hide My Email, integrated into iCloud+, generates anonymous email addresses that forward messages to users' actual inboxes while masking their identity. The feature has been effective because generated addresses share Apple's official domain, making them appear legitimate and harder to identify as masked accounts. Moving these addresses to a separate domain would make them easily recognizable as Apple-generated, potentially weakening their privacy value. Merchants and services could identify and filter these addresses, limiting their usefulness for protecting against tracking and spam. The change affects a core privacy tool that many users rely on for online security. Apple has not publicly announced the reason for the domain shift or provided a timeline beyond "coming weeks." The announcement has generated significant discussion in the tech community, with 177 comments on Hacker News discussing the implications for user privacy.