Corpus of network communications automatically sent to Apple by Yosemite

[song]

I'm very glad for that thread. I didn't know that I also needed to uncheck "Include Spotlight Suggestions" in Safari additionally to Preferences.

I do not understand why there's such a backlash against anyone that points out that:

1. It's not intuitive to have to both disable "Include Spotlight Suggestions" in Safari and in Preferences.

2. People like my father who are privacy conscious but are average computer users would not think to look for this in Spotlight and Search and instead would look in the privacy tab instead

3. Apple released and advertises cool privacy features like MAC address randomization that actually do not work. It only works with Location Services and 3G disabled according to the reports which is never going to happen. This makes me feel that the new focus on privacy from Apple is more for PR purpose than something they really care for.

That said, I like Apple products, I've been using macs since 2004 and I would have a hard time going back to using Linux (still have nightmares about all the work needed to support my laptop correctly) but that doesn't mean I'm giving them a pass on those privacy issues.

I know a lot of people here feel that all of this is much ado about nothing but really, it's clearly not obvious and if I hadn't read yesterday's thread I wouldn't have been aware that Safari sends my search to Apple even if selected Duck Duck Go and disabled Spotlight Suggestions in preferences.

[rsynnott]

> This makes me feel that the new focus on privacy from Apple is more for PR purpose than something they really care for.

It may well be something that some parts of the organisation care about, but clearly it is not something that the UX people designing the settings applets care about (assuming such people exist; for a company generally very good at UI and UX, Apple tends to have very confusing settings stuff).

[simonh]

>This makes me feel that the new focus on privacy from Apple is more for PR purpose than something they really care for.

Clearly they are doing it for their own purposes, and your post is fair comment, but if their interests and their customer's interests align then that's good for both sides.

It's also possible that while their current privacy oriented features leave gaps that are exploitable, that's just because the remaining gaps are trickier to address and will just take longer. Also just because elements of the communications infrastructure they don't control may be open, that doesn't mean they should therefore leave the elements of it they do control open as well. It certainly doesn't mean that them locking down those elemts is somehow necessarily a cynical move. That's not the sort of attitude I think we should be taking as it explicitly penalises and discourages individuals and companies from even trying to improve things.

[deadweight4]

The text when you open spotlight explains that it's looking on the internet. The first icon is safari. Every search you do, including siri, kortana, and ok google sends information to the respective company. Apparently bendgate didn't satisfy the fans, so they had to come up with a tortured reason to be all upset. I really tire of this horse shit, and would expect better.

[madeofpalk]

That Mail one is probably the least alarming, and I would assume that Outlook does the same thing. When you first set up a mail account, it sends your email domain to https://mac-services.apple.com/iconfig/dconf and, provided Apple has a match for it, it will return auto-configure POP/IMAP/SMTP settings.

If you enter your email as @apple.com, it returns back:

    <domain> 
      <name>apple.com</name> 
      <service> 
        <hostname>mail.apple.com</hostname> 
        <port>993</port> 
        <protocol>IMAP</protocol> 
        <ssl /> 
        <requires>MACOSX</requires> 
        <authentication>PLAIN</authentication> 
      </service> 
      <...>
    </domain>

[JetSpiegel]

Thunderbird has a similar service, but you can click on Manual Config and input that by hand.

[tkubacki]

Funny - just compare how Ubuntu was bashed for Amazon lens in Unity and how differently Apple is treated for the same (or even worse) things here on HN

[micampe]

I see the opposite, but I always try to remind myself that it's just my (and your) bias showing and not comment on it, because I would almost certainly be wrong.

For example, the highly inflammatory title for yesterday's submission (no privacy by design) stayed unmoderated for the entire day, until it went off the front page.

This issue has had multiple submissions in the past two days and they received plenty of votes, it doesn't seem "HN" is giving it preferential treatment.

[higherpurpose]

Same for Microsoft. There was barely any backlash at all when Windows 8.1 introduced search that also sent your local file searches to advertisers.

[the_mitsuhiko]

My mac has not yet shown me advertisements for when I was looking for my files.

[sbuk]

Are you suggesting that Apple is sending this data to advertisers? Do you have any evidence of this?

[simme_]

Original discussion can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8479958

[pilsetnieks]

This one might be more relevant: "Disable sharing of Spotlight searches with Apple" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8473580

Hint: you have to uncheck two checkboxes that OS X explicitly tells you about in the very same Spotlight preferences, plus another one in Location preferences.

[jumpwah]

What happened to it, why would it get pulled?

[eknkc]

Am I missing something here? The web search / autocomplete functionality contacts some servers.. You can disable them. Mail client tries to fetch known IMAP / SMTP info for a given domain to ease setup.

Are there some weird data being sent? Honestly, I might have missed some concerning communication but as far as I can tell, this is just for the sake of added functionality and can be disabled.

Expecting OS level stuff to work without network data at year 2014 seems somewhat bizarre. This is like complaining that apt-get leaks info to home, telling about the packages you install.

[userbinator]

Expecting OS level stuff to work without network data at year 2014 seems somewhat bizarre. This is like complaining that apt-get leaks info to home, telling about the packages you install.

No, the difference is that people do have a general idea about whether things should be done locally or sent out into the Internet, and searching files stored locally does not belong in the latter category.

[splaff]

I think the various surveillance and privacy revelations of 2011-2013 have different opinions about network data in 2014...

[esolyt]

I recently replaced Spotlight with Alfred and realized how much I was missing out. It's surprisingly faster and cleaner. I would really suggest it to anyone who haven't tried it yet.

[ntaso]

Now is probably the time to replace Spotlight as well. I wasn't terribly satisfied with it either for one simple reason: I open one specific file called "todo.taskpaper" with Spotlight all the time. So while I type t-o-d-... Spotlight doesn't remember that I want to open this specific file. I don't open anything else from Spotlight that starts with "tod" or even "to".

Quick test in Alfred: Seems to have learned that "to" = "todo.taskpaper" after 1 try.

[bloke_zero]

Alfred is great - it was my replacement for quicksilver when I got tired of endless config. Made by nice people too (as far as I can tell).

[nodata]

Have you compared Alfred with Spotlight in Yosemite?

[davidw]

It searches the web as well as your local drives, so sending those searches out is exactly what I'd expect. Now, I can also see the case for not making 'do a web search too' the default, but if you can't have that and not share your searches with Apple.

[ctz]

> you can't have that and not share your searches with Apple

Why on earth not? Why can't the search box just talk to DDG?

[adsr]

Can't this just be turned off with the Spotlight setting in system preferences though? For browsers it seems to be the same for all that uses the unified search field, it was last time a checked Chrome with tcpdump. I personally preferred to have the URL field separate from the search field for that reason.

[masklinn]

> Can't this just be turned off with the Spotlight setting in system preferences though?

Yes. Although note that it will not disable Safari's "spotlight suggestions" which have to be disabled separately via Safari's own preferences.

[f3llowtraveler]

I am extremely disturbed by this report.

I have been a faithful Apple user for years, but this single report causes me to seriously consider switching to Linux for good.

[coldtea]

You mean to get something like Ubuntu that does the same thing?

Let's set this straight: anything that gives you suggestions (for search, products, dictionary definitions, songs, etc) from the internet, is by definition sending your query to some internet server.

Next drama: Google searches send my search queries to Google.

[dustinfarris]

Is the data sent to Apple personally identifiable? How long is it retained? If the NSA (inevitably) decides to crash the party, what is the nature of the information that they walk away with?

These are all questions that should have readily available answers.

[jason_slack]

Has anyone found a way in 10.10 to completely disable spotlight and notification center? I know I can disable in system preferences but what about getting rid of the icons and completely stopping the services all together?

[abritishguy]

I like what I have seen with Apple's (apparent) focus on privacy with regards to iOS and the later iPhone models but this is pretty worrying - I'm not one to care about sending my data to some cloud service when it offers some tangible benefit to me, but some of this data is pretty intrusive and I can't see what benefit it is adding.

Assuming everything here is accurate then Apple have screwed up and really ought to rectify this pretty quickly if they want anything they say about privacy to be taken seriously in the future.

[stephen_g]

How else would they provide Apple Maps and web results in Spotlight though?

It actually has an explanation of exactly what it's sending and where in the Spotlight preference pane (click 'About Spotlight Suggestions and Privacy'), and exactly how to turn it off (you switch off 'Spotlight Suggestions' and 'Bing Search' in the list of things to search). It's not like this secret...

[blinkingled]

> About this Mac

When the user selects 'About this Mac' from the Apple menu, Yosemite phones home and s_vi, a unique analytics identifier, is included in the request. (si_vi is used by Adobe/Omniture's analytics software).

Wow. I am waiting for "Team Apple" to invent a radical defense on this one. But regardless this is shameful on Apple's part.

[rimantas]

Does it by any chance depend on checking "Send usage and diagnostics data to Apple" checkbox? Is that identifier used for anything else, i.e. can it be associated with something identifying the user, not just saying that all these requests came from the same machine?

[higherpurpose]

Microsoft has been doing this, too, since Windows 8.1, and it's going to do it even more aggressively with Windows 10.

I'm not saying it to mean that it's okay - in fact quite the opposite. Both are doing it wrong, and I hope they stop, or at least give me an intuitive (not hidden within 100 other settings) way to disable it.

[dvhh]

citation required

[JamesBaxter]

I wonder if the iPhone does something similar

[madeofpalk]

Yup. Fire up Charles SSL proxy and you'll observe very similar behaviour (at least with Mail and Spotlight/Safari)

[tsenkov]

Disclaimer: I am building the mentioned app.

Pagehop (https://pagehopapp.com/), a launcher targeting only the Web, doesn't send your search queries to any server of ours, and allows searching in many different sources (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, StackOverflow, YouTube, even some very specific sources such as jQuery's API documentation, the Mozilla Developer Network or the NPM archive). You can add sources (recipes) yourself.

We don't use a central server, instead the app taps into free web services (where possible) or scrapes the sites (where not).

It basically is a pack of many horizontal and vertical search engines with a single UI and the ability to use tools for post-processing of web results such as Regexes and Fuzzy Matching.

Pagehop queries are a simpler version of executing commands in the Terminal and you can pipe tools, one after another, just the same.

You should check it out (or not) - it has an unlimited, free and fully functional evaluation period (nothing is locked, just like SublimeText).

[teamhappy]

We've read plenty of interesting explanations in this thread. Anybody care to explain to me what great feature is hidden behind the "About This Mac" cookie or where to find the button to disable it?

[nashequilibrium]

mmmmmmm