Apple Email Protection for iPadOS 15, iOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8
One of the key highlights of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC21) held on June 7th was the Mail Privacy Protection. Since then, the email community has been abuzz as users gear up to adopt Apple’s Mail app on iPadOS 15, iOS 15, macOS Monterey, and watchOS 8 devices. The new Mail Privacy Protection is set to launch later this year, somewhere around September and November 2021.
According to a statement from Apple, Mail Privacy Protection is designed to stop senders from utilizing invisible pixels to gather information about the user. It typically prevents senders from telling when the user opens an email and conceals their IP address to ensure it can’t be associated with other online activity or utilized to determine the user location.
Giving Users Control Over their Privacy
The Mail Privacy Protection enables users to better control and manage third-party access to their data. These security features are part of Apple’s most current innovations in privacy leadership. Over the years, the company has continually demonstrated its commitment to privacy across the industry with features such as Privacy Nutrition Labels and App Tracking Transparency on the App Store.
According to Apple, “Privacy has been core to our work at Apple from the very onset. Every year, we strive to create new technology to help users gain more control over their data and make more informed decisions about who they share it with. As usual, this year’s updates come with innovative features that give users more granular control and deeper insights than ever before.”
Other essential features of the Mail Privacy Protection include:
Hide My Email Feature
With the Hide My Email feature, users share unique, random email address variations that forward to their personal inbox whenever they wish to keep their personal email address anonymous.
Protect Data from Third Parties
Mail Privacy Protection also stops senders from embedding invisible pixels to collect personal information about the user. With this new feature, users can prevent senders from recognizing when they open an email or identify other online activities revealing their location.
This privacy feature has been used by Safari Browser for several years for Intelligent Tracking Prevention, protecting users from unwanted tracking through on-device machines while allowing websites to run normally. Today, Intelligent Tracking Prevention is growing even more robust by masking the user’s IP address and location from trackers. In other words, third parties can’t utilize your IP address as a unique identifier to link your browsing activity across websites and create a profile about you.
App Privacy Report
With App Privacy Report, you can see how often every app has used the permission you’ve previously granted them to access your location, camera, photos, microphone, and contacts over the last seven days. As a result, you can figure out whether the data makes sense to you and take the necessary action if it doesn’t. Users can also determine entities with whom their data is shared by analyzing all the third-party domains the app is contacting.
Manage Audio of Siri Requests on Your Device
The on-device speech recognition enables users’ audio requests to be processed right on their iPad or iPhone devices by default. Consequently, it addresses one of the greatest privacy concerns with voice assistants – unwanted audio recordings. Siri processing also moves on the device when processing several requests, allowing requests to be processed even without an internet connection. For example, you can launch apps, set timers and alarms, change settings, or control music.
Enhance Internet Privacy with iCloud+
The proprietary iCloud+ combines everything users love about iCloud with fresh premium features, such as iCloud Private Relay, expanded HomeKit Secure Video support, and Hide My Email at no additional cost.
Private Relay is an internet privacy service built right into iCloud, enabling users to connect to and browse the internet more securely and privately. It ensures all traffic leaving your device is encrypted. Other than the user and the website they’re visiting, no one else can access and read the data, not even Apple or your network provider.
Additionally, iCloud+ supports HomeKit Secure Video, which allows users to connect extra cameras in the Home app. It also gives users end-to-end encrypted storage for home security video footage, which doesn’t count against their device’s storage capacity. Moreover, HomeKit Secure Video enables users’ security cameras to detect, analyze, and encrypt data before storing them in iCloud.
Additional Features for Users and Developers
The new Apple Email Protection releases also feature powerful tools developers can leverage to enhance app functionality while maintaining user privacy. With “share current location,” you can easily share your location with an app only once, without allowing further access after the session. Besides, developers can modify the share current location icon and integrate it into their apps directly.
Developers can also offer smart functionality using the improved Photos limited library access. For example, they can use a recent photos folder for certain albums even when the user has only allowed limited access.
What the New Features Mean for Email Marketers
Over the recent years, data privacy has become a significant issue, not just in the email industry. For instance, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives people the right to delete their personal data, anonymizing it to marketers. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) also enacts its own privacy protections, and now there’s the loss of third-party cookies on Google Chrome too.
With the entrant of Apple’s new Email Protection, email marketers are increasingly finding it hard to leverage user data to customize their marketing messages. Moving forward, any business looking to leverage email marketing must become more innovative in collecting user insights without infringing on the prevailing privacy laws.
Wrapping Up
Based on the latest security and privacy measures put in place by Apple, users can take better control over the use of their private data. At Corptek Solutions, we always keep tabs on new technologies and advise businesses on how to best leverage them to their advantage. We provide IT services and IT support to organizations throughout Dallas and Fort Worth. Contact us today to learn more about the new Apple Email Protection and how it may affect your email marketing strategies.
