Apple gives iOS apps ‘Privacy Report’ and comes with iCloud subscription with VPN

Apps in iOS get an ‘App Privacy Report’. The operating system shows an overview of which apps have requested which information. Apple also comes with a paid version of iCloud with a built-in VPN.

The App Privacy Report comes in the new version of the mobile operating system, the company announced during WWDC developer conference. The Privacy Report provides users with an overview of iPhone functions that apps have recently accessed. For example, you can see which apps have recently requested location data or access to photos, or vice versa, when was the last time a particular app did so. The Privacy Report is very similar to a feature that Google recently announced for Android 12 . It also contains such information about which functions appeal to apps.

The new version of iOS also gets several other new features to better protect users’ privacy. Among other things, there will be a new way of recovering an account. Users can now choose one or more friends to act as a backup in case they lose access to their device. These friends will then receive a verification code that allows users to get their account back.

Apple is also releasing a “digital legacy” that allows users to set up an heir who can access certain features and apps when the user dies. The company hasn’t released much information about that yet, so it’s not sure yet how that works.

Apple is also extending the Hide My Email feature to the email app. That feature was already included in last year’s Apple single sign-on, but users will soon be able to deploy it in Mail as well. With Hide My E-mail it is possible to create a temporary, anonymous e-mail address. E-mails that come in are automatically forwarded to the user’s inbox.

Those last two new features come in a paid version of iCloud. It’s called iCloud+, and it also consists of a VPN called Private Relay. It encrypts traffic in Safari and sends it through two different relays, or nodes, which means that Apple cannot trace the traffic either. The paid iCloud+ is a replacement for the current paid iCloud subscription.

Update: The piece first stated that iCloud+ would come on top of existing iCloud subscriptions.