Apple’s Hide My Email feature is a convenient privacy tool that uses disposable addresses to hide a user’s true email for the sake of online anonymity. Unfortunately, new research appears to show that a bug in the feature allows users’ real email addresses to be unmasked.

The bug was reported by 404 Media, which says that it has tested and verified that the vulnerability exists. Tyler Murphy, the researcher who found the bug, said that he warned Apple about the problem over a year ago, and that it was unclear why the company had yet to remedy the problem. All of the attempts to exploit the bug have been successful, Murphy added.

“We don’t know the full scope of the issue, but in our limited tests with volunteers, 100% of Hide My Email addresses were exploitable,” Murphy told the outlet. Details of the vulnerability haven’t been publicly disclosed, for fear that it will be exploited.

Murphy is the co-founder of EasyOptOuts, which offers a paid data removal service that takes your information off of data broker sites. He told 404 Media that “publicly accessible people-search sites make it easy to link an email address to other personal details, so people relying on Hide My Email for safety may be at risk.”

TechCrunch reached out to Apple for more information and will update this story if it responds.

When it comes to the tech world, privacy tools are hard to come by and, unfortunately, even when they do exist, they don’t always work. Apple has been accused of this sort of thing before.

Case in point: the company was sued in 2022 after it was reported that iPhone apps continued to send analytics data to Apple even when the iPhone Analytics privacy setting was turned on.

Similarly, in 2023, researchers found another one of Apple’s privacy features to be effectively “useless.” The research claimed that a tool that was supposed to anonymize mobile users’ WiFi connections by providing randomized MAC addresses (an easily trackable identifier) was simply exposing the user’s real MAC address.

Apple has built a large part of its reputation and branding on user privacy, so hopefully it manages to address the apparent Hide My Email bug with some expedience. If it can learn to better stand behind its privacy promises, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world either.

Ashton Kutcher is stepping away from Sound Ventures — the firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago — to start a separate VC fund, the Wall Street Journal reported. TechCrunch had separately heard that Kutcher was preparing to leave; the WSJ’s report confirms it and adds new detail on his plans with Beller.

The actor and investor’s new firm is being co-founded with Morgan Beller — its name hasn’t been made public yet — who until recently was a general partner at seed-focused VC outfit NFX and previously co-led cryptocurrency project Libra at Meta. Beller also spent nearly three years as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Kutcher’s exit doesn’t appear to be a sign of trouble at Sound Ventures — investors more often leave firms that are underperforming, and that’s not the case here. The firm, which has backed companies like Brex and Gusto, was also an early investor in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs.

The split is also notable for what it signals about where AI money is heading next: Sound built its reputation on concentrated, high-conviction bets in category-leading AI labs, while Kutcher’s new fund appears to be chasing the layer underneath those companies — the infrastructure and energy that power them.

“He and his fund consistently make it onto [my] rankings of top unicorn investors. An interesting case!” Stanford finance professor Ilya Strebulaev, who tracks top-performing VCs, wrote on X.

The actor has known OpenAI’s Sam Altman since Altman founded Loopt — years before the launch of the ChatGPT maker.

Kutcher’s departure was partly due to different views on which startup stages to target for investments, with Sound leaning toward backing companies that are already more established, rather than betting on very early-stage startups, according to WSJ.

Kutcher and Beller are focused on making early-stage investments in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech startups — startups built around hard science and engineering breakthroughs rather than software alone.

Despite leaving Sound Ventures, Kutcher will continue to serve as an advisor to the firm. Meanwhile, Oseary and Sound general partner Effie Epstein will advise Kutcher and Beller’s new firm.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has shown investors a prototype of a “handset-like” AI device, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The prototype is reportedly sleeker and slimmer than an iPhone, making us wonder if it’s something between a small touchscreen phone and a Rabbit R1. SpaceX reportedly showed the device to investors and stakeholders before it went public, and told them it’s at an early enough stage that the design could still change. 

Musk has denied the reporting, calling it “utterly false.”

SpaceX, alongside sister company Tesla, does have the manufacturing expertise to pull off mass producing a bunch of AI devices — not to mention access to the chips needed to power any on-device compute. SpaceX has also signaled that it’s keen to expand into wireless, with Starlink Mobile as a potential competitor to Verizon and AT&T. One analyst even went as far as to speculate that T-Mobile or AT&T would make fine acquisition targets for the rocket builder, though such a purchase would, undoubtedly, be pricey.

It’s also not clear if SpaceX is just throwing spaghetti at the wall or if it will attempt to really mass produce and market such a device. But one thing that seems clearer is that if OpenAI is doing it, Musk would, perhaps, want to try to do it better.

As we know, OpenAI is working with Apple’s former chief design officer Jony Ive on an AI device that CEO Sam Altman has claimed will be more peaceful than an iPhone. Reports from last autumn suggest the company has been struggling to get the details right, and OpenAI recently brought on another Apple executive to potentially help move things along. News dropped last week that Paul Meade, Apple’s VP in charge of the Vision Pro headset, has joined OpenAI’s hardware team. 

Like OpenAI, SpaceX’s prototype is reportedly designed to run on a proprietary operating system and integrate technology from xAI, Musk’s AI company that SpaceX acquired earlier this year. This would prevent these new devices from being trapped inside another company’s platforms (like Google’s Android). But also, the intent appears to also be to create something new, with native AI interfaces. That said, the graveyard is crowded with the unsuccessful launches of AI devices from companies like Humane and Rabbit. A company wanting to sell an AI device, does not equate consumers wanting to buy such a thing. Yet.