Follow the announcements of Apple’s latest hardware and software updates, as the company kicks off its worldwide developers conference amid rumblings of discontent from its partners
iCloud gets a few new updates – you can give your backup keys to someone else, in case you forget your password, and a new digital legacy service manages your data if you die.
But the service also gets a new name, and a pair of huge privacy-focused fatures. iCloud+ will now offer “Private relay”, bouncing all your safari browsing through Apple’s servers to hide your location from sites, and “Hide My Email”, letting you use the same email obfuscation tools from Sign In With Apple wherever you want. And it stays the same price!
Federighi jumps down a CGI hole (?!) into a dark room, turns to the camera, and says “at Apple, we believe privacy is a human right”. Yes, it’s the privacy section.
So what’s new? Apple Mail is going to start blocking tracking pixels – “Mail Privacy Protection” – to prevent senders from seeing if you’ve opened emails and hiding your IP address. Elsewhere, a new App Privacy Report lets you see how often apps look at your location, photos, camera, microphone and contacts, and check all the third party domains an app is contacting. These could get spicy. A lot of marketers are not going to be happy.
