Apple announces iCloud+ privacy features at WWDC

Digital privacy sure is great, if you can afford it.

At Monday's WWDC, Apple announced a host of new features which lean into its privacy-focused branding. As part of iCloud+, the new paid service will include both "Hide My Email" and "Private Relay" — the former will theoretically help you hide your real email address from online services, while the latter will work to mask your IP address.

If Private Relay sounds a bit like a VPN to you, you're not too far off (though there are some important distinctions).

"[Private Relay] ensures that the traffic leaving your device is encrypted, so no one can intercept and read it," the company announced at WWDC. "And all of your requests are sent through two separate internet relays. It's designed so that no one, including Apple, can see both who you are and what sites you're visiting."

Apple got into more detail about how Private Relay works in a press release.

"The first [relay] assigns the user an anonymous IP address that maps to their region but not their actual location," reads the release. "The second decrypts the web address they want to visit and forwards them to their destination."

Hide it! Credit: apple

Hide My Email, on the other hand, lets you share unique and random email addresses with companies like food delivery services or ticketing websites. That random email address will then forward any messages to your personal (and real) email inbox, thus letting you get the emails you want without having to hand over your real email in the process.

As companies are hacked all the time (spilling customer data in the process) this could be great way to keep your email address out of the hands of would be credential stuffers.

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These services will be in addition to the storage that iPhone users now associate with iCloud, and will reportedly come at no extra cost (if you're already paying for iCloud).