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> iirc Private Relay doesn't get enabled automatically at all?

That's incorrect, private relay -did- get enabled automatically on all my machines without my express permission or consent. Same goes for the "hide my email" functionality recent macOS versions have included in the mail app.

I've found I have to regularly monitor the configuration setting for iCloud-related services in System Preferences as Apple has a bad habit of auto-enabling new features like Private Relay without explicit user consent. Just because I want ONE app to use iCloud Drive for file sharing across devices seems to indicate to macOS that I want to automatically allow every other app (BY DEFAULT) to be allowed to use iCloud Drive. Such is definitely not the case, I can assure you.

"Live text" where macOS automatically reads the text in images to make it selectable (as if anyone asked for that) also represented a privacy nightmare like the above services, so that along with iCloud private relay and hide my email are all on the list of IMMEDIATE disables after every new macOS install for me.

And the amount of times I've had to again re-disable the auto-uploading of the Desktop & Documents folders on my parents macOS machines is pretty disturbing and quite frustrating for my parents too, who also never wanted a huge bulk of the files on their machines to suddenly be offloaded to Apple's cloud without their explicit consent.

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> where macOS automatically reads the text in images to make it selectable (as if anyone asked for that)

I saw a lot of excited people on Twitter when that feature was first enabled. For example for students, having images of books or posters be automatically copyable and searchable is very useful.

[gbN025tt2Z1E2E4]

That's fine, so just make it a right-click menu service item versus automatically enabling it globally for every image across the entire OS by default for everyone. I know lots of security folks who find it useful storing malware code as an image for reference since that was relatively safe to keep around since it couldn't be accidentally executed and/or being flagged by anti-virus apps. Suddenly macOS was reading that code and introducing a whole new avenue for security vulnerabilities.