MAIL, PRIVACY, AND iCLOUD+
Enhance your privacy and security
Mail’s new Privacy Protection is designed to make it harder for those sending mail to you to follow your activity when you receive their incoming message in the Mail app, but doesn’t apply to third– party mail clients. It does this by hiding the IP address normally seen from the Internet for your Mac, and loads any remote content in the message privately in the background. That prevents the sender from matching your email address, IP address, and information they can gather from your connection to that remote content.
Mail does this even when you don’t open the message in your Inbox. If you use email much to exchange messages with companies or organisations which might send links to sites designed to extract personal information, this is a valuable addition. If almost all your messages are with friends or other individuals, then it’s probably not going to be worth enabling.
When you first open Mail in Monterey, a splash window asks you to choose whether you want Privacy Protection enabled; you can change that later using the Privacy tool in Mail’s preferences. The app is largely unchanged, but hopefully being steadily stripped of bugs lingering from Big Sur.
KEEP IT UNIQUE
Apple’s forthcoming iCloud+ service adds two further features to your mail.
Hide My Email is an addition to Mail Privacy Protection which lets you send and receive email without using your real email address. You do this using unique, random addresses created as part of the new iCloud+ service, which forward all incoming messages to the Inbox of your real address. The other feature does almost the exact opposite: you can obtain your own personal domain name, which can be shared between invited family members.
The other major innovation in iCloud+ is Private Relay, which protects your privacy when browsing with Safari. When this is active, Monterey ensures that all your outgoing requests and traffic are encrypted and pass into the Private Relay service in iCloud. Your traffic is then sent through two separate relays, the first of which
anonymizes the IP address, and the second decrypts the destination address and forwards the message. Together these ensure that your IP address, location, and details of browsing activity are inaccessible to the site Safari connects to. Apple claims that it too has no access to the info, but this has yet to be fully evaluated by external security researchers.
iCloud Private Relay isn’t the same as Virtual Private Networking (VPN), and won’t be available in some countries like China, but should prove an effective way to prevent sites from gaining the information they can obtain at present. How useful it is depends on the sites you visit, and how much you value your privacy. If you use a VPN service, then it won’t be a full substitute.
The final new component in the iCloud+ service supports HomeKit Secure Video. This connects your security cameras through your Home app to store their recordings in iCloud. They’re automatically kept there fully encrypted end–to–end, so that even Apple doesn’t have access to their content, only you and those you authorize to view them. In case you’re wondering how much all this encrypted video is going to cost in iCloud storage, Apple says that none of your HomeKit Secure Video will count against your storage allowance, as it’s all part of the iCloud+ subscription.