The big thing This week, Apple further doubled down on its commitment to privacy as a key marketing pillar, declaring privacy a "fundamental human right." They also took the time to showcase a new subscription product complete with paid privacy features called iCloud+. It includes a handful of new features alongside storage including added HomeKit camera storage and a pair of features called Private Relay and Hide My Email. From our story on the upgrades: In Safari, Apple is going to launch a new privacy feature called Private Relay. It sounds a bit like the new DNS feature that Apple has been developing with Cloudflare. Originally named Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS, Private Relay could be a better name for something quite simple — a combination of DNS-over-HTTPS with proxy servers. When Private Relay is turned on, nobody can track your browsing history — not your internet service provider, anyone standing in the middle of your request between your device and the server you're requesting information from… The second iCloud+ feature is 'Hide my email'. It lets you generate random email addresses when you sign up to a newsletter or when you create an account on a website. If you've used 'Sign in with Apple', you know that Apple offers you the option to use fake iCloud email addresses. This works similarly, but for any app. It’s an… interesting… move for Apple to start monetizing privacy-centric features and use them to push users towards storing more data on their servers, Private Relay and Hide my email are purely convenience-driven and don’t seem to provide real platform advantages for Apple while clearly benefitting users. These are all things that are good for consumer privacy and make for very simple marketing slam dunks, but Apple seems to be drawing a line on what privacy features should be available by default and which should further line their coffers. |
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