alt Hacker NewsGreat. If you insist on giving me a fake email, your business is probably a liability I don't want anyway.
Of course this is industry-dependent (I'm in payments processing) and not every business should have this posture, but being able to distinguish between users who are going out of their way to be anonymous and users who aren't is a useful signal.
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As others have alluded to, I'm not doing this to be anonymous, I'm doing this because companies can't be trusted not to leak my email address. Every real business that knows my real identity (banks, payroll, government, retailers, etc.) gets its own alias.
When an organization invariably leaks my email and I start receiving spam to it, I generate a new one, update my email on record, deactivate the old one, and the spam stops.
There's nothing "fake" about the email. It's just an alias made specifically for each recipient.
> If you insist on giving me a fake email, your business is probably a liability I don't want anyway
It's not a fake e-mail, it's a legitimate e-mail that you can send e-mail to and the user will receive, which has to be created by a paying iCloud user and not an anonymous rando off the internet.
I'd be interested to know what downsides, if any, you see for a website to accept a private e-mail address like this. Do you have a legitimate complaint about these sorts of e-mails? Again, given that private relay isn't an 'anonymous e-mail service' (it's still tied to your iCloud account so spam, etc. shouldn't be any more of an issue) but merely an 'anonymous to the person you're giving the e-mail to' service.
If your actual complaint is 'if you insist on giving me an e-mail that you can revoke unilaterally making me unable to contact you against your wishes, and which cannot be associated with other user data from other sources to build a profile of you, then you're not worth having as a customer' then that's a separate complaint - and one that means I want nothing to do with your website.