- I've spent the last couple of weeks
testing out all the new features on iOS 15,
but what I've been really focused on
are the new privacy features.
What I'm going to show you,
you're only going to see on your iPhone or iPad
after you've updated to the new iOS 15,
and that becomes available sometime in late September.
But right now, I want to give you a sneak peek
into the six new privacy features,
some of which I really liked
and others, I don't quite find as useful.
And then actually show you how to use them on my device.
(electronic music)
Welcome to All Things Secured. My name's Josh.
And despite the recent controversy
about Apple's new child protection measures,
which I've already done a video about,
today, I want to focus on the new privacy features
that we do have access to in iOS 15.
Most of what you'll hear on the internet about iOS 15
will highlight things like focus mode,
the redesign notification, spatial audio, et cetera,
but as with any new operating system,
there are these tiny tweaks and changes that are being made
that may not make the headlines
because they're not very flashy or sexy.
Which makes me, a guy who's not very flashy,
and arguably has the kind of sexiness
that only a wife could love,
the perfect guy to share them with you.
So with that saucy introduction, let's go ahead and dive in.
The first big change I want to talk about here
is how your updated device will work with Siri.
From now on, all Siri requests
will be processed on the device itself
without having to be recorded or sent up to Apple servers.
One of the main reasons that I don't own an Alexa
a Google Home, a Facebook Portal,
or many of the other smart devices
is because I don't like the idea that every word I say,
every sound that's made in my house
is possibly being recorded and stored in a server somewhere.
It just doesn't sit well with me. You know?
So now I can ask Siri to do things like open an app,
find a maps location, or read a message
and since the requests are processed on the device,
I not only gain a little bit of privacy, it's also faster.
And it works even if my network coverage gets spotty.
The next feature called mail privacy protection
is interesting because of how much controversy
it stirred up within the email marketing industry.
You see, whenever you open an email on your phone
or your computer, you often load images,
sometimes an invisible pixel
that not only alerts the sender that the email was opened,
but it can also be used to track your IP address
with a general location.
It's because of this
that I can actually look at my email list
and not only know who has opened my emails,
but also generally where they're located in the world.
With Apple's new mail privacy protection,
all of this is about to change.
Apple will now preload all content on proxy servers
before you download it to your device,
which will protect your IP address
and keep the sender from knowing when,
or even if you opened the email.
As far as the sender's concerned, at least the senders
who are tracking the emails they send you,
it will look like you opened
pretty much every single one of the emails they sent you.
And that means that from now on,
the most important metric for them
will be how often they can get you to click on a link
or to reply to the email.
Now, as somebody who sends emails, myself,
and tracks open rates,
I'm not sure if this will hurt or help you the end consumer,
since I use open rates to determine
whether or not you're still interested
in the content that I send
and if I should keep on sending emails to you.
It's also important to note that this only works
if you use the Apple Mail app.
If you happen to use the Gmail app or any other email app
to send and receive email on your iPhone,
mail privacy protection isn't going to work for you.
Remember that.
This is going to be a common theme throughout this video.
Now, since we're on the subject of email,
let's talk about hide my email.
This is a feature which basically expands on the sign in
with Apple feature to be used anywhere online, all right?
Imagine if you could create infinite email addresses,
use a unique email for every single log-in
and then maintain control of each of those addresses.
That's what hide my email does.
Let's say you visit All Things Secured
and you want to download the privacy checklist we offer,
while in Safari, as you fill in the form that you see here,
you can click hide my email
and Apple will automatically create a new email address
that is forwarded to an email account that you choose.
You still receive the emails,
but now you haven't given away your real email address.
And the real beauty of this
is that you can log into your settings
and take control of these proxy email addresses.
You can change the label to be something you'll remember,
change where it's forwarded to, what email address,
make a note of why you gave them this email address,
or even deactivate the email address
if you no longer want the emails.
Now, there are two downsides to using this feature.
The first is that in order to auto create
these email addresses,
you have to be using Safari as your web browser.
Again, Apple is pushing us to use their native apps.
Personally, I use Firefox right now,
and while I can manually create these email addresses
from within the hide my email settings page,
that is not nearly as convenient.
The second downside is that this is a paid feature.
This and the new privacy relay,
which I'll explain in a moment
are included as part of any iCloud plan,
whether that's a standalone iCloud Plus storage plan
or the Apple One plan.
Personally, I think it's a great feature.
I love the ability to mask my email address.
But since I don't use Safari
as my default browser right now,
it's not nearly as useful as it could be.
My hope is that eventually the auto-fill will be expanded
and made available to all the other browsers as well.
And now that we're talking about paid iCloud features,
let's just go ahead and cover Apple's privacy relay.
Now I've already talked about this in depth
in my last video, which you should watch next,
but the short of it is that privacy relay
acts almost like a cross between a VPN and a Tor connection.
In this case, your Safari internet traffic is encrypted.
It's routed through Apple servers
where your IP address is stripped away
and then sent to third party servers
where they add a random IP address, decrypt the traffic,
and then send it to the correct URL.
The added privacy comes into play
because Apple supposedly won't have the ability
to know what websites you're accessing,
but in the end, the third party server,
which in my testing has been CloudFlare
and the end website won't know your original IP address
or have any way to identify you.
Like I said, it's similar to a VPN or Tor,
except that you don't have the ability
to choose the location of that server,
where you're eventually going to access the internet,
that third-party server.
So with privacy relay,
you do get some interesting privacy benefits,
but it only works for what you do within the Safari browser,
not any other app on your phone.
And it doesn't provide any help with geoblocking.
Oh, and not surprisingly,
this feature won't be available in countries
like China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
and other authoritarian governments
that feel threatened by this kind of feature.
I'm going to finish up with two final features
that you're less likely to hear about
in the mainstream media.
The first is a feature that Apple is calling secure paste.
You see, in previous versions of iOS
and with pretty much all Android devices,
what you keep on your clipboard,
which is the last thing that you click copy on,
was, or is readable by the next app that you opened.
Now, while this may not seem like a big deal,
there are many people who use password managers
or other means of storing passwords,
where they copy and paste it into the login form.
They probably didn't realize it,
but that copied password was viewable
by other apps that they opened.
And although that's not a huge security risk,
it was a small loophole that has now been closed.
Now, your clipboard or paste board
or whatever you want to call it is secured
and inaccessible by other apps.
The last feature is the app privacy report.
I'm not going to spend too much time on this
because frankly, in its current form,
I found this feature to be pretty much useless.
Within my settings, if I scroll down and click on privacy,
there's this new menu item on the bottom
called record app activity.
So when activated, it records a seven day summary
of what apps access your data
such as when they record your location
or whatever you're saying through your microphone.
Now, this would be really interesting data to see.
And I'm sure it would be really helpful
to determine any kind of foul play,
but for now, when you download the report,
which I did and open it up, and you can see it here,
it's really hard to understand.
Instead of being the kind of beautiful graphical display
that Apple is known for,
this looks more like a log file that you download
and send to customer support for troubleshooting.
And maybe that's exactly what this is.
So as a feature, I'm sure it's useful,
but there's not much that I personally got out of it.
So, which of these six features do you find most useful?
Do you use Apple's Mail app and Safari app
enough that it makes sense for you?
Leave a comment below to offer your thoughts
and subscribe to All Things Secured because you know,
you care about your online privacy and security.
Stay safe.