[abritishguy]

I like what I have seen with Apple's (apparent) focus on privacy with regards to iOS and the later iPhone models but this is pretty worrying - I'm not one to care about sending my data to some cloud service when it offers some tangible benefit to me, but some of this data is pretty intrusive and I can't see what benefit it is adding.

Assuming everything here is accurate then Apple have screwed up and really ought to rectify this pretty quickly if they want anything they say about privacy to be taken seriously in the future.

[stephen_g]

How else would they provide Apple Maps and web results in Spotlight though?

It actually has an explanation of exactly what it's sending and where in the Spotlight preference pane (click 'About Spotlight Suggestions and Privacy'), and exactly how to turn it off (you switch off 'Spotlight Suggestions' and 'Bing Search' in the list of things to search). It's not like this secret...