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Apple has provided federal agents with the real identities of at least two customers who used one of the company’s privacy features designed to mask their email addresses from apps and websites.

“Hide My Email” is a feature that allows paying Apple iCloud+ customers to generate anonymous email addresses that forward messages to a person’s private email address. Apple says it does not read messages that are forwarded. But the court documents show that this email privacy feature will not prevent law enforcement from discovering who owns an anonymous iCloud address.

According to court records seen by TechCrunch, the FBI requested records from Apple earlier this month as part of an investigation into an email allegedly threatening Alexis Wilkins, the girlfriend of FBI director Kash Patel, whose relationship with Patel has been widely reported.

“In response to a law enforcement request, Apple provided records indicating that [the Hide My Email address] is an anonymized email account associated with the Target Apple Account,” reads the affidavit for the search warrant, which was first reported by 404 Media (via Court Watch).

Apple provided the account holder’s full name and email address, as well as records for 134 anonymized email accounts created using Hide My Email.

TechCrunch has seen a second search warrant, in which Apple turned over information about another customer in response to a request from federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations, a unit within ICE. The search warrant sought records from Apple during an investigation into an alleged identity fraud scheme. An HSI agent, citing “records received from Apple” in January 2026, noted that the alleged fraudster had created several anonymized email addresses through Hide My Email across multiple Apple accounts.

Apple touts much of its iCloud service as end-to-end encrypted, meaning that nobody other than its customers can access their own data, not even Apple. But not all customer information is beyond law enforcement’s reach, including information Apple stores about its customers, such as their names, where they live, and their billing information, as well as unencrypted information, such as emails.

The ability for law enforcement to access this information also underscores the privacy limitations of emails; the vast majority of emails sent, even today, are not encrypted and contain plaintext information needed to route messages around the world.

As such, demand for end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, like Signal, has ballooned in popularity in an effort to protect private data from both surveillance and malicious hackers.

A spokesperson for Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

Topics

Apple, cybersecurity, email, end-to-end encryption, privacy, Security

Zack Whittaker

Security Editor

Zack Whittaker is the security editor at TechCrunch. He also authors the weekly cybersecurity newsletter, this week in security.

He can be reached via encrypted message at zackwhittaker.1337 on Signal. You can also contact him by email, or to verify outreach, at zack.whittaker@techcrunch.com.

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Apple will hide your email address from apps and websites, but not cops