Yes - anything that doesn't need to be accessing the internet. Plus Google things that phone home. It's fun to watch them get frustrated and light up red in the activity monitor as they desperately try to send back metrics.
If you use Google as your DNS server, sometimes various Google services will just send the same requests over port 53 to 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 instead of the normal IP.
I have blocked everything Adobe Lightroom and its little cloud friends try to do, except on install to validate key. And a bunch of other apps / Apple services. If it wasn't for Little Snitch I wouldn't feel at ease running Mac instead of Linux. For me MacOS is a decent compromise between privacy and convenience because of Little Snitch. (Except that I implicitly add to the problem by accepting Mac in my life, leading by example and all that. Still struggling with that. But I tell myself I have bigger fish to fry.)
I have used Little Snitch for quite a while, then switched to Hands Off because I liked its interface a bit better and the ability to set a rule that would clear at reboot was a win. I regularly block outgoing connections; tracking attempts by Google, Apple & Microsoft (no PowerPoint, you don't need to check in to Skype at each launch...), limiting a lot of apps to loopback connections rather than full outgoing connectivity, etc.
Another benefit is that once I get over the initial rule configuration hump (and it is a real PITA for the first week or two) what I end up seeing are the anomalies and so I can pay closer attention to what has changed or where something is trying to connect that I might want to think about.
Yeah, it was there but well hidden and an additional click with the mouse vs. being able to do it easily via keyboard. Small things like this really added up to push me to Hands Off, but I may give Little Snitch a look again if the price for upgrading from 2.0 is not unreasonable...
People do it for pirated copies of Adobe software because of how much it phones home. Do a quick google search and you'll find many sn/crack/warez (do people still use that word?) instructions talk about editing hosts files or installing Little Snitch.
I do it even though I have legal copies of Microsoft Office and Adobe software. It is incredible how often these apps send around data even while I am not using them and have no live.com account.
How did you get around not having live.com for MS Office? I've got the retail box of 2016 for Mac (not the 365 one) and it still required me to make one :(
At every launch, it connects to login.live.com and live.com.akadns.net.
The Photos app makes requests to some concerning endpoints that I wish they could add a way to disable those features, like "FaceRecognition" or the like. Which it is implied that the iPhone photos app probably does it too.
Not sure what data it uploads but there is no info surrounding this.
Yes. Applications only get access to the resources needed to do what I want them to. Sorry, nobody gets telemetry.
It is a bit of a pain the first couple times you run a new app, but settles down fairly quickly. OS X upgrades are far worse - Apple seems to build a dozen new weird little things that want to connect to god knows what every release, and the right answer there is, for instance, `sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.gamed Disabled -bool true`
Aside from blocking unwanted telemetry, I have multiple profiles that I switch between depending on the network I'm connected to. If I'm tethered to my phone, I restrict almost all traffic unless it's something I'm using so I can conserve data. The profile assigned to my home network is a lot more open.
