When evaluating these trade-offs, we considered what would make our products and services worthy of trust. While this feature provides privacy for one user, it can cause alarm for another. The owner might perceive the obscured viewer as a hacker who is trying to steal their valuable information, or as someone they simply didn’t want to share the document with. It could be particularly alarming if the document contains sensitive and private information. From a privacy perspective, this could be concerning to the owner of the file because they can’t recognize who is viewing their document. The experience becomes more complex when a user who has hidden their email address is viewing a shared file. When the recipient sees the sender’s email address, they might perceive the entire email as spam due to the nature of the obscured email address. If a sender initially signed up for Dropbox using Apple’s “Hide My Email” feature, their randomly generated email address will be surfaced to a recipient within any notification email. For example, when users share files or folders with each other, the recipient will receive an email notification from the sender.Īfter we gained a better understanding of “Hide My Email,” we took a look at the existing user flows within our product and realized that this feature might cause several problems in the core experience. The complexity came from the “ Hide My Email” feature inherent in “Sign in with Apple.” It allows the user to obscure their personal email address when signing up for an app, using a unique, randomly generated email address created by Apple.Īn example of a hidden email created with Apple’s Hide My Email is a tool for collaboration, and we often surface our users’ email addresses throughout our products. Apple made it simple for developers to integrate the “Sign in with Apple” feature with their apps, but the scope of the project increased after we further investigated an additional feature that was bundled with “Sign in with Apple.”

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