Apple’s Hide My Email feature lets users keep their personal email addresses private, away from the information brokers who sell lists of email addresses and phone numbers that drive the global scourge of spam and cold calling.
Now it seems Google has decided to follow suit—a surprise decision no-one saw coming and which was not touted with the other privacy and security updates this year. Per Android Authority
“With Hide My Email,” Apple explains, “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.”
While this enables users to forward these ghost email addresses to any email address associated with their iCloud account, it really comes into its own when used with Apple’s own Mail and Safari apps.
This allows you to send messages directly from those shielded addresses, and also offers the option to easily create a ghost email address whenever you’re asked for an email address within a form on Safari.
Tearing down the new 24.45.33 APK release of Google Play Services, “and upon cracking it open,” the website explains it has found “a whole boatload of strings referencing and in support of something called ‘Shielded Email’.”
This system “to create single-use or limited-use email aliases that will forward messages along to your primary account.” And while “we could imagine that something like this might be pretty useful in Chrome,” which would mirror Apple’s approach, this current reveal is focused instead on “specifically addressing apps that ask for your email address,” which is why it’s been found in a Play update.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-shielded-email-3499803/
As noted by 9to5Google, “the experience looks to be integrated with Android’s autofill and presumably the Google Password Manager… It remains to be seen whether Google will charge for Shielded Email. Besides encouraging people to sign-up for Google One, making it paid could be a way to make sure functionality isn’t abused.”