This is the default behavior, without enabling anything (you cannot disable the T2 chip reaching out to security.apple.com), whether or not you have Find My™ enabled. You cannot disable this "feature."
If you take a brand new Apple computer and turn it on, literally the first DNS query it makes (before MacOS even begins to load) is to `security.apple.com` – with zero configuration – and you can never disable this behavior (it is embedded into Apple's T2 SoC).
Every boot thereafter, the Apple product attempts to re-query this host; if connected (and black-listed) the computer is immediately disabled.
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Similarly, Microsoft has OS-level phone-homing which contacts host `spynet2.microsoft.com`, which is certainly an interesting naming scheme (at least they're open about it). This also ignores the user-supplied DNS (in Settings >> Networking >> NIC >> DNS ).
I don't want spotlight to show any online results in the first place, is there anyone here who does?
Admittedly I haven't confirmed that this results in no API calls in the latest few macOS releases but it definitely used to stop them, at least a few years ago.
Again, though, I haven’t set up a Mac fresh in a while.
also, search for "improve" in settings. I'll bet you didn't find "Help Apple Improve Search" in the results. Ironic on many levels.
In my opinion (to answer your question): "yes."
And of course, I'll bet all your data was mined before you turned things off.
does this seem user-friendly? seems deliberately hostile to me (though par for the course nowadays)
I recently set up my old 2009 iMac [0], and it tickled-me-pink that even the Microsoft Office installer was opt-in by default (i.e. the telemetry option was OFF by default, with the installer asking if you wanted to opt-in).
[0] this was about a month ago, right before the ArtCraft's reverse-engineering of Adobe's products; I restored this iMac simply to run my legally-purchased copy of Photoshop CS4 (a non-subscription edition circa 2006)
But macOS makes it extremely difficult to search your local files (without using Spotlight) so you effectively cannot search your offline APFS without revealing your local queries (to Apple, at a minimum).
This seems wrong.
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I've met several $100k+ tech geniuses who absolutely refuse to believe this behavior is normal/default – but a local PiHole (or simple internet searches) reveal this Truth (capital t, with respects to DFW).
While providing over-the-shoulder IT support, I saw a hardware designer for a tech company enter proprietary company information into his "local" Spotlight search (to find a CAD file he had recently designed, demonstrating that the computer was "working"); when I told him about smoot.apple.com (e.g: Spotlight local queries offloading) his face turned white – fortunately that company only has a few thousand customers (very niche hardware designs for BMS/power delivery management), and no "real" competition... but he still refuses to fully believe the levels of telemetry in 2026.
(I think the LG TV story last month "woke him up"; the Bitcoin Ledger embedded SoC SIM key-thefts via man in the middle attacks should bring out the last remaining tinfoil hats). Stay frosty.