Spotlight Suggestions Sends Minimum Amount of Data to Apple, Exact Location and IP Addresses Not Collected

bbeagle said:

It's been this way on Google for years.

Type pizza, and you'll get pizza places around you. Hmmmm.... How does that work?

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A lot of people I know that harp on about how bad google is then go ahead and use their search. Go figure.
Even the ones that don’t use it will say, ‘Google it’.
That’s how we get the info we want, go to the best source - a lot of those that harp on about the lack of privacy by google need to remember that those free searches they perform need to be paid for somewhere.
Apple do monetize you of course, it would seem though that they try and keep the money in house, I suspect that they do share as much info as they can whilst keeping within the semantics of the statements they make to the press. I don’t think it’s a huge deal but it should be disabled by default.

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x34 said:

why don't you report about this macrumors?

under: Non-Cloud Mail Account

"When setting up a new Mail.app account for the address admin@fix-macosx.com, which is hosted locally, searching the logs for "fix-macosx.com" shows that Mail quietly sends the domain entered by the user to Apple, too."

https://github.com/fix-macosx/yosemite-phone-home

this is really really bad!

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Interesting, very interesting.

Where did users first mention this?

Opt-out always was, is and always will be user-hostile.

.. aaand it's back to Alfred. Thanks but no thanks, Spotlight.

Won't be enough for the tinfoil hat crowd. The OS also communicates to Apple for Safari's suggestions, when setting up an email address to look up ISP data and several other things. Which of course, they do securely, to protect your data. Which of course Slashdot was going NUTS over yesterday - "Yosemite is sending stuff I can't see the content of, to Apple's servers! They must be sending all my keystrokes to the NSA so they can put me on their database of gays to put up against a wall with their families when they become an evil regime!"

ulyssesric said:

Can you verify what Google does ?

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don't mention their name - blasphemy!

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I hated the new spotlight at first, was a massive difference to previous iterations. After a few hours of getting used to it, quite like the new changes

hobo.hopkins said:

Sounds like a lot of worry over a non-issue.

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This post is a wonderful example of the amount of denial and blind trust in Apple's practices than ever. It certainly removes any need to think for oneself.

Check out the number of up votes, no wonder Apple's laughing all the way to the bank.

Hoodwinked by Apple is a way of life...

I want spotlight to find stuff on my computer, which it does amazingly well. If I want to search the web then I'll do it in my browser, if I want to use the calculator I'd rather spend the extra half a second to do it in a notification widget. If I want to search my mail I'll search in mail. When I use spotlight why would I want to clutter up what it does best. That's my take on it anyway.

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iososx said:

Check out the number of up votes, no wonder Apple's laughing all the way to the bank.

Hoodwinked by Apple is a way of life...

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Number of up votes? Oh right 15 people out of 50 million. And don't forget down voting has been removed.

hobo.hopkins said:

Sounds like a lot of worry over a non-issue.

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Considering that most of the people complaining use Google technologies, it's almost laughable.

x34 said:

why don't you report about this macrumors?

under: Non-Cloud Mail Account

"When setting up a new Mail.app account for the address admin@fix-macosx.com, which is hosted locally, searching the logs for "fix-macosx.com" shows that Mail quietly sends the domain entered by the user to Apple, too."

https://github.com/fix-macosx/yosemite-phone-home

this is really really bad!

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It doesn't actually send your full email address, only the domain name. So if your email is iloveponiesandpandas@seriousbusiness.com, Apple will only see seriousbusiness.com.

The purpose of that feature appears to be one-click configuration of server settings for common email providers, e.g., Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, Aol, etc. Also I don't think that feature is new to Yosemite, I remember setting up Hotmail in Lion and it configured all server settings automatically.

Honestly, I don't see how this is a big deal. Not requiring users to choose between IMAP and POP3, type in separate servers for sending and receiving email, port numbers, authentication and SSL/TLS encryption settings is a very useful feature with minimal privacy impact.
In fact, just connecting to a public wifi with your email client open (even if it's configured to use TLS everywhere) every time leaks as much if not more information than is sent to Apple just once (when setting up the email account).

What I find interesting, if not hypocritical, is when the self-proclaimed privacy aficionados freak out over a non-issue and then open Facebook, Google Maps, play Angry Birds, Candy Crush, use a fitness tracking app or any of over 90% apps on the App Store that send their usage patterns and behaviors to Flurry, Google Analytics, Crashlytics, Localytics, Mobile App Tracking, Fiksu, Chartboost, Crittercism, Mixpanel, RevMob, MoPub, Tapstream, New Relic, Kontagent, AppsFlyer, Apptimize, Amplitude and dozens and dozens of other companies most people have never heard of. That information is then processed in a "big data"-y way, correlated with online (web browsing history, ad clicks, social networks) and offline data (public records, magazine subscriptions, loyalty schemes, credit reports) and then sold to a highest bidder, or even to criminals directly, see https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/03...rvice-to-access-200-million-consumer-records/.

SPUY767 said:

Considering that most of the people complaining use Google technologies, it's almost laughable.

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Yes, and for the truly paranoid that claim Google's the big bad wolf, there is but one solution.

Yet few if any have the courage to choose it.. Get off the Web Now!

MeFromHere said:

Calculator in spotlight is one of my favorites. Type something that looks like a formula, like "73*58+13". Spotlight evaluates the formula as you type, showing the result in the search results. You don't even have to launch the calculator app.

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Yeah, I love this. I keep catching myself doing this at work, too, but that's a Windows machine. This causes me to literally curse Windows (mildly) almost every day.

Apple needs to find a better way here, since sending spotlight (local and web searches) info back to Apple's/Microsoft's servers are the default in Yosemite, as this appears at direct odds with their focus on user privacy on their phones etc....

"We also worked closely with Microsoft to protect our users' privacy. Apple forwards only commonly searched terms and only city-level location information to Bing. Microsoft does not store search queries or receive users' IP addresses."

Microsoft, more than any other company in the world, is the wrong company to be in bed with regarding protecting user privacy and designed in government access.

With what we know Microsoft has done, designed in NSA access to all Skype user communications (video, audio, text) as well as designed in pre-encryption access to Outlook.com & Hotmail.com e-mail among other things) and those are just things we know of - Bing almost certainly has designed in NSA access as well (too much of a honeypot not for the NSA to want that). It is important to know NSL's don't make a company do these things, this was Microsoft being a great partner with the NSA (which the NSA calls out in some of the Snowden documents), thinking these were good things to do and betraying their customers trust.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

Of course there was a reason Microsoft didn't say a word about Windows Phone while Apple and Google announced they were encrypting their user's cell phone data. They are so not the company to be working with regarding protecting user privacy.

gavroche said:

I haven't turned it off, but i deselected half of the things it can search.

Edit: What in the world is the use of spotlight searches including.... conversions, calculator, and my personal favorite... "other"

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The conversions are AWESOME. Start typing 20 MPH or 200 pounds to see what I mean.

Not sure if answered, didn't see.

But what about purely local file searches.

If I am searching for a sensitive document on my local computer, is that sending that information to Apple servers? Even if it's just sending the search text?

to me, Thats a big no no.

gavroche said:

I haven't turned it off, but i deselected half of the things it can search.

Edit: What in the world is the use of spotlight searches including.... conversions, calculator, and my personal favorite... "other"

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You can use spotlight as a calculator. Type in an expression and it will calculate it for you.

Type in a number with a unit (like 100km) and it will show you conversions.

As for other, it's most likely the metadata associated with a file. You can manually add metadata to a file by several means. The newest way is in the tags section when you get the info on a file (COMMAND+I) and add search tags.

logicstudiouser said:

I'll stick with snow leopard & ios 6 thank you.

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Their best OS's to date.

iososx said:

Yes, and for the truly paranoid that claim Google's the big bad wolf, there is but one solution.

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Use duckduckgo for default search engine.

If it only worked where I live..

Seriously, what is the obstacle that prevents Apple from enabling Wikipedia searching etc. in every region?

I understand that looking up cinemas etc. is much more difficult, but wikipedia and a lot of other stuff is so universal.

And meanwhile, Google does the same thing, but they forward all the information to advertisers.

Fzang said:

Still doesn't work here. Not even through VPN to the US.

Do I really have to be on US soil to use Wikipedia through Spotlight?

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Works fine for me in the UK. Command-space, enter a name of someone reasonably famous, and spotlight shows a short article right there and a link to the wikipedia article. It's not always the first; for musicians it tends to show songs in the iTunes library first.

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Sasparilla said:

Apple needs to find a better way here, since sending spotlight (local and web searches) info back to Apple's/Microsoft's servers are the default in Yosemite, as this appears at direct odds with their focus on user privacy on their phones etc....

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So how do you suggest is Spotlight supposed to look for stuff on the Internet without sending out what you are looking for?

gavroche said:

I haven't turned it off, but i deselected half of the things it can search.

Edit: What in the world is the use of spotlight searches including.... conversions, calculator, and my personal favorite... "other"

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Calculator is very handy.

CMD+Space type 457345*2345 get answer

chrf097 said:

And meanwhile, Google does the same thing, but they forward all the information to advertisers.

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That is not how google works. But nice try with the FUD.

Google doesn't sell nor forward personal information to anyone. Google is an analytics machine that takes your information and calculates data based on that.

GOOGLE knows that you like X and Y, so google then turns and sells X and Y advertisement space. Google serves up the ads to you.

how this works from a sales standpoint. Google knows that out of all their users, X amount like and have searched for product Y. They then tell company B, that they can ensure that Company B's advertising will hit X amount of views and then charge that company accordingly. Google then serves that ad to you.

this FUD that google sells your personal data to other companies is pure BS. it's similar to a lot of the pure BS you get on this site too from people who hate apple.

gnasher729 said:

So how do you suggest is Spotlight supposed to look for stuff on the Internet without sending out what you are looking for?

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I think the problem comes from the fact that many people consider "Spotlight" to be a local-machine search engine, when it was rather quietly upgraded behind the covers to also include online search.

Now this doesn't sound too bad, except that of course we have nothing to gain when we are indeed looking around for local stuff (files, emails etc) and your Mac quietly forwards this information to Apple and Microsoft.

Plus, there's the privacy implications. When I search on Google for fluffy kittens it's clear to me that Google must pick up that information, otherwise it wouldn't work. When I search my Mac for that email from my accountant about my tax afairs, or indeed any other private bit of information stored on my PC, it's not ok for that search to be forwarded to Apple and Microsoft.

For a company so noisily committed to user privacy, this is an unethical and unacceptable intrusion, made worse by the opt-out process. This is not a mistake, it's design. It shows their true colors.

logicstudiouser said:

I'll stick with snow leopard & ios 6 thank you.

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Keep clinging to 2011-12, the rest of the world will move on without you.