Here are three fantastic iCloud+ features you might not be taking advantage of

In more recent years, Apple has introduced a number of interesting and privacy-preserving features for iCloud subscribers. It even rebranded its subscription to iCloud+ around the launch of these new features, highlighting the fact that iCloud is more than just a storage subscription.

If you’re a more privacy-conscious person, you should definitely make sure you’re taking full advantage of the three features mentioned below.

iCloud Private Relay

Introduced in 2021, iCloud Private Relay essentially serves as a mini VPN of sorts. When using Safari on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, Apple will encrypt your DNS query and HTTP traffic and send it through their proxy. Afterwards, Apple strips your IP address (though retains a rough idea of your region), then sends it through another proxy, which then in turns gets your request website to you.

While this feature does unfortunately only work in Safari and isn’t a system-wide feature, it does protect you from websites that may want to build a profile on you through your web activity. It’s available for all iCloud+ subscribers, for as little as $0.99/month.

Hide My Email

This feature was also introduced in 2021, and it’s sort of self-explanatory.

As an iCloud+ subscriber, when you’re signing up for a new website, email list, subscription, or anything else you’d need to prove an email for – Apple will provide a custom, one use email just for that one service.

This has two key benefits. For one, it prevents your personal email address from being sold to a data broker and getting spam emails.

On top of that, it means that if your email does get sold for spam (or if you just don’t want to hear from whatever company you gave your email to anymore) – you can cut that email address off in just a second, and you’ll no longer see any emails associated with that address in your inbox. You also have the option to turn it back on if you’d like.

In short, Hide My Email provides a level of granularity for email that’s both privacy-focused and convenient.

Advanced Data Protection

While Apple does tote the privacy benefits of everything they make, iCloud data isn’t truly private if you aren’t utilizing Advanced Data Protection. iCloud data is encrypted by default, but Advanced Data Protection brings end-to-end encryption to every iCloud service.

With end-to-end encryption, it means that Apple couldn’t decrypt your data even if they wanted to. Only you hold the key to decrypt your iCloud data. This does mean that if you lose your recovery key, you also lose your data – and there’s nothing Apple can do to help.

Advanced Data Protection means that key categories like iCloud Backups, iMessage texts, Photos, and more are no longer accessible to Apple – no matter what. You can check out this great explainer on our YouTube channel for a deeper dive on Advanced Data Protection:

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