You probably have tried to sign up for some free goodies online at some point, but everything has a price – sometimes it comes in the form of annoying marketing messages that you’d like to opt out. One way of working around this problem is by creating throwaway accounts that you only use once, which Google is working on, dubbed “Shielded Email”.
Google’s “Shielded Email” Feature
According to Android Authority, under the hood of the Google Play Services version 24.45.33 there are several lines of code referencing a feature called “Shielded Email”. The same name is also found under “Autofill with Google” settings page, though the publication noted that the feature is inaccessible for now.
From its description, it looks like this feature is designed to create single-use email addresses that can be used to sign up for websites that a user may not feel comfortable to use their primary email address for any reason. Any messages received by that email can thus be forwarded to the primary email, and user can opt to discard the email at any time to stop the forwarding as they see fit.
There’s a few upsides for this – namely, less of your data gets shared to the service, and by extension, the risk of data breach is mitigated. In fact, that’s exactly what the strings of code suggested. In its current state, it looks like it is designed for Android apps first, but we see no reason for Google to not extend this feature to Chrome/Gmail as well.
Pokdepinion: Our work emails certainly has a fair share of spam messages, so it’d be a great feature to keep our inboxes clean.
