Be Careful Using Hide My Email Everywhere

Hide My Email is a great privacy feature of Apple's iCloud+ service. But using it to sign up for sites means your ID is now unique and unusual. This can be a problem if you need to get support from that site or reset your password.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me explain why it may not be a good idea to use Hide My Email all the time. 
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Now Hide My Email is a great feature of iCloud Plus. That's iCloud when you pay for something, like a little bit of storage. Then you have all these extra features including Hide My Email. If you turn that On it allows you to create these email addresses on the fly when you signup for something online and then the email that you get sent from that site or company goes to that special email address and is forwarded to you by Apple to your regular email address. So the company or website doesn't have your actual email address.
The idea is that you could simply shutoff that special email address if you get spammed by that company or it is obvious that that email address has been sold and you are getting a lot of spam to it. It also is great because that site or company doesn't actually know who you are. They can't take that email address and then cross reference it with other companies and figure out your identity. So you're kind of signing up for something anonymously. Certainly this is a great feature for signing up for things when you don't really trust the site or company. If you need to signup for a website and they need an email address from you, you could provide this Hide My Email address instead of your real one. 
But, does that mean you should use it everywhere? Well, there's one case that I'm seeing a lot of where you may not want to use it. If you go to MacMost.com you don't need to signup for anything. There is no registration. All the stuff is there on the site. But for my courses website and other things like Patreon you need to signup using an email address because you need to have an account. There needs to be some sort of User ID and your User ID is usually your email address because it is unique and owned by you. 
Now let's say you go to my courses site here and you want to create a new account. If you click here to enter your email address then you'll see Hide My Email as one of the options. You may think this is a great option. If you use it you'll generate this unique email address that you can certainly use as your ID and email sent to it will get to you and the site has no idea who you are. So you can use Hide My Email email address for signing up to any site, or social media sites, or shopping sites, for banking sites, anything you want. You can use Hide My Email in place of you actual email address.
Here's the problem. That's now your ID for this site. So if at some point in the future you forget your password or you loose it, it's somehow erased from the Password Manager and you want to actually get the reminder or reset link for your password there's no way you're going to know this is your ID for that site. Also, if you need to enter in your ID manually for some reason you're going to have to type this whole thing in after you figure out what Hide My Email address you used to signup for it. I've already had cases where somebody has contacted me saying they can't remember how to log onto my courses website. Can I help? I can't find their email address anywhere as a user. It turns out they used one of these Hide My Email addresses and now it is impossible to connect them back to their real account. 
So keep this in mind as you use Hide My Email to signup for sites and services. So if you're just signing up for something one time just to get past a gate or just get a onetime message or buy one product from a company or something like that then Hide My Email is pretty useful. But if it is a site you plan on going back to again and this is now going to be your ID for that site then it's a good idea to use your real email address. Remember that legitimate companies, real companies with people and buildings and names and stock market tickers and all or that, you can always Unsubscribe from any emails they send you. They have to abide by certain rules and laws. For the most part they do. So don't worry too much about the spam aspect of it, but do worry about loosing access to your account because you simply erased this Hide My Email address or somehow you forgot which one you've used with that site. I see this as becoming a bigger and bigger problem as more and more people use Hide My Email and similar email alias services. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Be Careful Using Hide My Email Everywhere”

David Chadderton

10 months ago

You can find the addresses you have used and the sites you have used them on in System Preferences if you go to iCloud -> Hide My Email.

Erik Gregorie

I used Abine.com for a while with a service to blind/mask my address and the ability to "turn off" the company's access to me and then miss something that I really needed to hear about. I had to turn the forwarding back on again. I can see someone using the hide ability on a credit card site or the like to be "more secure" and then not get an email they really need to see.

Jasper

Is there a way to make a back up of your Hide-My-Emails? Presumably it’s somewhere in Library or cloudkit so maybe a Terminal command could make a text file. (At least, I do this with Safari bookmarks).

I use an Apple text expansion to a single Hide-My-Email address for stuff like restaurant bookings. So it’s not site-unique but it’s a little easier to keep track of than full Hide-My-Email. Probably the most important thing is not to give out your Apple ID email and use an alias.

Gary Rosenzweig

Jasper: The idea with Hide My Email is to use them once or for just one site/service. Sounds like you would be getter off using an alias (iCloud offers those, and also some others) or plus addressing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKA-csnrqFw

Be Careful Using Hide My Email Everywhere

Comments: 4 Responses to “Be Careful Using Hide My Email Everywhere”

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