The move isn’t surprising, but shows what data is available to authorities when paying Apple customers use the Hide My Email feature.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20260326195046/https://www.404media.co/apple-gives-fbi-a-users-real-name-hidden-behind-hide-my-email-feature/
Oh, no. An American company abides by American laws. I’m the most shocked I’ve ever been in my entire life.
The service isn’t advertised as being for anonymity.
“With Hide My Email, you can generate unique, random email addresses that forward to your personal email account, so you don’t have to share your real email address when filling out forms or signing up for newsletters on the web, or when sending email,” Apple’s website adds.
That seems pretty clearly to be meant to avoid simple things like spam on your main email. I can’t imagine most people expecting much more than that. There is always a special level of idiot, but most people would never assume that this would keep you protected from police.
Not to mention this was a result of a search warrant, Apple wasn’t proactively providing anything. So this is a non-story honestly. It’s exactly how the process should work. Someone made an explicit threat, law enforcement got a search warrant, the provider complied with the court ordered warrant requirement. This shit happens thousands of times per day and always have.
Pretty much any anonymization system like this is designed to protect your real identity and address from bad actors, not to hide you from the police. Protecting your anonymity against the government itself requires an entirely different approach, NONE of the publicly available email aliasing systems are designed for that.
The victim of this overreach was a piece of shit and a chronic bad troll by the sounds of it, misusing email aliases to harass people. Even though this was likely special treatment because they sent abusive messages to the Director of the FBI’s girlfriend, it’s hard to be anti corpo-state surveillance when assholes like that get picked off so easily. But we here all know that it starts with the scum and power always gets misused.
it’s hard to be anti corpo-state surveillance when assholes like that get picked off so easily
No it’s actually still really easy, even more so in this example where it was just corruption for personal benefit and not used against any kind of legitimate threat to the public.
The data was turned over during an investigation into a man who allegedly sent a threatening email to Alexis Wilkins, the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel.
Great. Justice being done huh. Corrupt-ass motherfucking piece of shit continuing to use the office for himself and only himself.
Hows those Epstein files workin’ out Kash? Your congressional perjury indictment come through yet?
