Hide My Email, price rises, Apple Upgrade, and mass iPhone production starts, on the AppleInsider Podcast

**Wesley Hilliard** (0:04)
Hello, and welcome to the Apple Insider Podcast. This is your host, Wesley Hilliard speaking. I'm joined once again by William Gallagher over there, probably in this sweltering, lovely July heat, probably sweating some financial stuff. We'll get into that in a minute.
Also, I'd like to thank our sponsor, MasterClass. If you don't want to hear anything about sponsors, you can join Apple Insider Plus. It's our paid ad-free subscription.
You get that either on Apple Podcasts or Patreon. This week, the extended portion of the show that is only for Apple Insider Plus subscribers will be about finance. Apple's dive into fintech, Samsung apparently has jumped in as well. I just want to talk a little bit about where our financial lives and our tech lives cross and how we manage all of that, what we're doing. We can talk about Apple Wallet, we can talk about reminders, we can talk about filing taxes. It's a whole subject, so stick around for that. William, how are you today?

**William Gallagher** (1:04)
Well, actually, I'm feeling really good because here in the UK, we've just introduced a thing called making tax digital. Basically, the upshot of which is we file quarterly instead of annually in certain circumstances, and I've done it. I have actually finished all of my tasks. Usually, it's like at the last second, but now I'm feeling pretty good.
Apart from, yes, you're right about the sweltering heat. I'm grand. How is it over there? I take it cool, relaxed, fine.

**Wesley Hilliard** (1:32)
Raining. We might get more rain while we're recording. It's always a nice background effect when we get the rain. But yes, we're not going to talk about Samsung. There's a story I wrote just because everyone seemed to want to talk about it. They came out with their own card. It's black, it's metal, unspecified metal.
I don't know. Well, sure, 5% back on all Samsung purchases. But how often are you buying a refrigerator? I don't know. Then 3% cash back on everything where Samsung Wallet is accepted. I think that's the asterisk. I don't think I've ever seen Samsung Wallet on a website before. Correct me if I'm wrong, listeners. Someone out there with a Samsung phone is probably exclusively using Samsung Wallet for all we know. But everyone's like, oh, 3% on everything. That's better than Apple Card.
When you're using Samsung Wallet, I mean, if it is ubiquitous, great. That's a good deal. I'm not complaining. But I think the point I'm trying to make here is, in order to get this card, you have to own a Samsung Galaxy phone. This is not Android-wide. This is Samsung Galaxy because Samsung Wallet is the only place you can manage it, and it's on Samsung phones exclusively. We're not going to get into that beyond what I just said. William, there's been this whole thing about Hide My Email.
Where are we on this? What's going on here?

**William Gallagher** (2:57)
Okay. It used to work. It stopped working. Apple leaked things accidentally. They seem to have fixed it. Some people are saying, who notices anyway?
There you go. That's the whole summary of luck.

**Wesley Hilliard** (3:11)
We can move on.

**William Gallagher** (3:11)
Do you use it?
Do you? From time to time, you used it, but I've kind of regretted it. Nothing against Apple. It's just when I first go to a website and you've got to sign up for something, I don't always know that I'm actually going to use it. I'm looking at various things in a genre of them, and I'll stick with one. But then afterwards, when that is the one you want. Not like it's difficult to go back in under your own name, but I just-

**Wesley Hilliard** (3:39)
Well, Hide My Email is one of those things where people got really confused. I understand how you can get confused. Apple being the privacy and security company that they are, you would expect everything to have equal levels of treatment for privacy and security. But Hide My Email is a spam filter. I don't know that I expected it to be foolproof.
Apparently, if you do this specific thing as a sender, you can trick Apple Mail into exposing the actual Apple account email address.
But here's the thing, we're not aware of anyone actually exploiting this actively. And if they have, the result is you get a spam email. So, I don't know, and likely a spam email that got filtered to your junk anyway. So someone would have to actively have exploited it, gotten your actual Apple account email, sent you a spam email, and it bypassed your filters and landed in your inbox for you to even begin to notice. And then you don't even know that it originated from Hide My Email. So, we don't even know if this is, I was ever actively exploited, and it's a case by case basis. This, your email is valuable when it can be grouped with hundreds, thousands more other emails in a big group that they sell for five cents each. That is when it's valuable. No one is going to go out there and perform this task, one email at a time to expose the real email address, just add it to a list, just to sell it for a nickel. So, you're not that special. This gets back to the whole, we don't have our own personal FBI agent hovering over our shoulder. That's not how any of this works. That said, I will criticize Apple here to say, it should never have been possible to reveal your real Apple email address with Hide My Email. That does defeat the purpose of the service, but it has been patched. That specific one has been patched. But since then, we've heard about new vulnerabilities that can trick users into revealing their address. So, we'll get into that in a second. But how do you use Hide My Email?