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by gambiting1 days ago |
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upvoteby jmb991 days ago|
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Settings -> Spotlight -> Turn off everything you don't want. The first few times you open it it even tells you this.

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.

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upvoteby overfeed17 hours ago|
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Opt-out privacy isn't a policy an organization serious about Privacy - the sort Apple pretends to be - would adopt.
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upvoteby astafrig17 hours ago|
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Doesn’t it come up with a notice underneath the box that you have to click ‘Continue’ on to see online results?
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upvoteby overfeed14 hours ago|
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Does the notice make it any less of an opt-out?
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upvoteby astafrig9 hours ago|
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I’m not sure how much more of an opt-in you could make it than a button you have to click to turn it on.

Again, though, I haven’t set up a Mac fresh in a while.

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upvoteby m4631 days ago|
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you realize this is very laborious. every time you install a new app - or sometimes when you update an app - you have to do it again.

also, search for "improve" in settings. I'll bet you didn't find "Help Apple Improve Search" in the results. Ironic on many levels.

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upvoteby saimiam1 days ago|
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More laborious than installing piholes and managing DNS?
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upvoteby ProllyInfamous20 hours ago|
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It's intentionally more laborous, by design, to dark-pattern most users into allowing telemetry.

In my opinion (to answer your question): "yes."

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upvoteby m46321 hours ago|
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There are a bunch of settings for each app, they default to on, and you h ave to navigate to all of them one by one to turn them off.

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)

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upvoteby ProllyInfamous20 hours ago|
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>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)

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upvoteby ragall23 hours ago|
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Yes. DNS can be configured once and it's done, whereas having a setting that gets reset whenever an app gets (auto-)updated is treacherous.
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upvoteby asimovDev17 hours ago|
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I use it sometimes to quickly do currency conversion, I am assuming it does an online request to a currency exchange API. If that counts, then count me as a person who does want to see online results. But I did disable the web search results in Spotlight settings, that's just annoying
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upvoteby ProllyInfamous9 hours ago|
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Yes, your example "counts" (as somebody desiring the online features of Spotlight).

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.

----

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.

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