I watched the WWDC keynote at my desk on Monday with a cold Stumptown going warm next to the keyboard and a client Slack channel open in the other window. When the Sign In With Apple slide came up, the channel went quiet for about four seconds and then produced eleven messages. Not one of them was about privacy.
They were all about the button.
Here is what Apple actually shipped. A single sign on that does not hand a social graph to anybody. An option to hide your real address behind a relay email that Apple generates and you can switch off later. And a requirement: apps that offer third party login have to offer this one too.
Read the last sentence again. That is not a feature. That is a distribution mandate aimed at two competitors, delivered in the language of user protection.
When a platform turns a values statement into a requirement, it is not choosing privacy over commerce, it is deciding which company gets to define what privacy means to your customer.
I want to be fair here, because the feature is good. The relay address solves a real problem that nobody else was willing to solve, and any customer who has ever regretted a signup will feel the difference immediately. Good for people is not the same as neutral for brands.
Think about what your login screen says now. Three buttons in a row: Facebook, Google, Apple. That row reads as a values statement about you whether you meant it that way or not, and it is being read in a week when federal antitrust scrutiny of the large platforms is on every front page. The safe button becomes the default. When the safe button becomes the default, a meaningful slice of your list is a relay address you did not choose, cannot enrich, and can lose the moment a customer decides they are done with you.
So decide now, while it is still a choice. If lifecycle email is the spine of your business, earn the real address later, in the product, with a reason. If your positioning already runs on restraint, say so out loud instead of letting a platform say it for you. If you were planning to treat the login screen as an engineering ticket, stop.
The safe button becomes the default.
Saturday night I sang badly at the sticky-floored place off Belmont, and the host, who calls everyone baby, handed me the microphone without asking for an address, a birthday, or permission to contact me about similar offers. Two minutes of friction free identity, and I gave up nothing except my dignity on the bridge of a Fleetwood Mac song. Every other sign in this week has cost me more.