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1 year agoI’m not sure why this would be surprising to anyone. The point of announcing it now is so they can put it in the hands of devs to make 3rd party apps, of course their software isn’t complete and shippable on the day in which it’s announced to be shipping (probably) a year later.
I’m the CTO of a tech platform that has a consumer component of it, and the real issue is that normal people just have zero idea of how it works and generally expect it to work differently.
The main source of confusion is that if a service uses your email address to identify a user, and that user gives up a completely random email address, they now have no way of identifying themselves unless they remember they used hide my email.
They assume two things: 1) that they will still be identifiable by their “real” email address some how, and 2) if they do use their real email address later, it will somehow map back to the previous hidden email.
Also if they use Apple Mail, most of them are not aware of how to figure out what email address an email was sent to, so they can’t identify if they hid their email address, or not, even when we’re sending them emails.
My evidence for this is thousands and thousands of customer support cases. Our CS folks HATE this feature.